Re: Metaweb joins Google

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 19:36, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>wrote:

>
> The big 4 are getting ready for the upcoming semantic singularity
>
> google with metaweb
> ms with powerset
> facebook with ogp
> yahoo with search monkey
>
> it's more than dipping your toe in the water ... no one will want to be
> left behind in this game
>
> i personally think google have bought well and bought QUALITY
>
> followers of socionomics say that explosive turns normally happen
> (ironically) at time after there's been a long standing degree of pessimism
> in the market
>
> do the indicators point to the possibility that the sem web is approaching
> a point of inflection?
>

Personally believe the reason why Google bought MetaWeb is the Freebase
community. If it was about the data, they needn't have bothered, since it's
available under a Creative Commons license. Moreover, I find it hard to
believe it's about the technology, which I reckon for the likes of Google
isn't too hard to develop (if they don't already have)

Google once tried to build a community around their Wikipedia competitor and
failed pretty hard. To maintain a consistent (more or less) dataset, you
need human curation, and what is better than have a lot of people doing it
for you!

Besides that, I believe the reason why Google acquired Metaweb now, is that
they're feeling the heat from Facebook. With over half a billion active
users, spending on average nearly an hour a day on Facebook, it's not
difficult to see that once they start pulling the internet into the platform
(using the Open Graph Protocol) traditional search engines might soon become
obsolete.

Since it's more related to the social web than to the semantic web, I'll
leave it at that, but for those interested, I did a write-up of my ideas on
my blog.

-- 
Daniël Bos

email  : corani@gmail.com
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