Archive of thenextweb.com
In March I covered AndUnite, a service that matches your search keywords with those from other people – to help you find folks with similar interests. Although this idea may sound kind of awkward, I felt – and still feel – that Bernd Storm van‘s Gravesande and Christian Schmidkonz had developed a useful search plugin. You don’t need to tag, bookmark, or anything in that direction, AndUnite just works in the background, slowly but steadily connecting you to interesting people. Very 3.0. Moreover, it’s possible to sign up anonymously – so they’re hardly any privacy issues involved. But now, these two German gentlemen have taken it a step too far for me.
They’ve developed a Facebook application that allows you to share your searches. This was, apparently, a “major request by many users’. But why? Why would you want to share these – mostly boring or private – keywords on your Facebook profile. That’s what I want to figure out with you. Please tell me why you would, or wouldn’t, want to install this app.
A few weeks ago I saw a presentation by Dutch internet strategy adviser Freek Bijl. In his presentation he used a few simple but charming analogies to explain what Web3.0 is and what technologies it uses. The presentation was clear and easy to understand which is rare when it comes to technical stuff like this.
I complimented him on it and asked if he could make an English version available online so I could link to it but he replied that he didn’t have an English version. Today Freek emailed me that he took the effort of translating the whole presentation so we could post it here.
There are two parts to the presentation and I’m including the second, more indepth, version here. If you like the presentation do also check out Part 1.
Before I could post it here Slideshare discovered his presentation too and put it on their ‘featured‘ pages so it is becoming quite popular now.
As you might have noticed I’m writing a lot about search these days. In another post, I gave an explanation for that: people want to find similar people. Yet after a few days of reading about search and talking to search experts, I think I can broaden the reason somewhat: People are looking for two sorts of experts.
First of all, those with similar interest can be considered experts, since they know a little what you’re like and therefore can help you find the right stuff on the web. So that’s why a search engine like andUnite – that matches search terms – makes sense.
Second, we want professionals to scan whether the information we find is correct or not. Andrew Keen already warned us in his book ‘The Cult of the Amateur‘ for the damaging effects of false information – caused by the wisdom of crowds – can have. And let’s face it: the web is still really cluttered. Try finding a decent hotel with Google, I wish you all the best.
Newsweek published an excellent article about this last point this week. Jason Calacanis, founder of the human-powered search engine Mahalo – that will make finding that hotel easier with a Top 7 list – told Newsweek: “The wisdom of the crowds has peaked. Web 3.0 is taking what we’ve built in Web 2.0—the wisdom of the crowds—and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.” (more…)
