The box was from McGraw-Hill, and in it came twelve copies of Reshaping your business with web 2.0. Now, I’m an enthusiastic reader, but twelve copies are more than what I usually get when buying books: this one is the culmination of a year of work, in collaboration with fellow co-authors Vince Casarez, Billy Cripe and Philipp Weckerle. Yes, we wrote a book! In September 2007, we embarked on the following mission: define, dissect, and qualify the applicability of the recent innovations, permeating the consumer web today, to the more structured and rarefied world of the enterprise.

We wanted to bridge and relate the two environments, and show how the tools, the behaviors, and the culture of two-way participation, of collaboration omnipresent in the evolving consumer web could benefit companies hoping to foster productivity, to tighten the social fabric of their organizations, and to share information more efficiently.

Having developed an addiction for wikis, blogs, social networks and mash-ups ever since the early days of web 2.0, to the point of starting a company focusing on social annotations and ambient blog context augmentation, I felt tickled by the challenge of recasting the practices and technologies powering the web at large to address the specific needs of the enterprise, and I couldn’t have dreamt of better partners than Vince, Billy and Philipp, all from Oracle, to do it: they kept things real every step of the way, and I found the combination of our respective view-points most fruitful in coming up with actionable recommendations for CIOs and corporate IT decision makers.

About those twelve copies: I’m giving them away, on a first come first serve basis. Just ask (and promise you’ll write a review, good or bad, of the book on Amazon) and you can have yours now, even ahead of the official release date on October 2.

Speaking of official release, we’re scheduled to talk at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, on Wednesday September 24, at 1:00pm. Book signing right afterwards: come get your signed copy. Exciting!

Here’s the short, Twitter-friendly version: we’ve just been acquired by Buzzlogic. We’ve been talking to the team there for over six months: they rock. So I’m totally excited, elated, ecstatic, thrilled, stoked, and psyched about the deal. Did I mention I was excited?

A longer version follows, and you can also get more details about the news from the usual suspects.

I started Activeweave with Marc back in 2005. We built two products, BlogRovR and Stickis. Ever since, we’ve been focusing all our energy on building technology that would delight our users and help them as they go about their busy lives online. We’ve been working on doing one thing well: making it easy for you to stay informed in the face of ever growing quantities of content (some signal, some noise) fighting for your attention.

BlogRovR in particular has resonated with close to 200,000 of you, faithfully fetching posts relevant to the page you are visiting, from the bloggers you choose, and bringing them right into the browser as you go, for just-in-time context. BlogRovR connects readers and bloggers anywhere on the web where they have something of interest to say to each other. For a reader, it means seeing what your favorite bloggers have to say anywhere you surf, and for a blogger it gets your message to your readers beyond your blog or their feed reader, everywhere on the web where you have something to say.

We do this with an on-the-fly, personalized, contextual search. We’re nerds. But we don’t mind that others have thought this a mouthful and called us Techmeme on steroids, the Muhammad Ali of feed readers, or web 3.0 today instead.

We met the folks at Buzzlogic a while back and hit it off: they’ve been preoccupied with the blogosphere as well, working on technology to map conversations in a fine-grained fashion, tracking influence, and allowing their customers to better target their research and advertising. We saw the right synergies, we saw complementary business models, and we saw a great team in action.

We also saw a novel business opportunity. Buzzlogic is using an analysis of the blogosphere similar to ours to help advertisers identify its most influential regions, on which to message potential customers. Buzzlogic calls this conversation tracking. Both their current technologies and the directions in which they’re taking them align well with what we’ve done and the kinds of products we’ve been building. The more we talked about possible collaborations, the more areas of overlap emerged. It soon became clear that our technology could help inform Buzzlogic’s influence tracking, and that we would also be able to contribute personally to their future.

So, we’re moving onto even wider challenges from the ones we’ve been facing: Jean will become the Chief Technology Officer at Buzzlogic, and Marc will become Senior Vice President of Product.

The last two and a half years have been a wild ride. I remember reading on someone’s blog (where else?) only weeks before launching the company, that being an entrepreneur requires a hefty dose of irrationality: one has to find a way to brush off the countless near-catastrophic failures, the endless doubts, the crazy daily grind, and the reality of doing everything on half a shoestring, in order to thrive instead on the rare breakthrough, or the occasional unsolicited friendly message from a happy user. Indeed, we experienced all of this first hand. But as Winston Churchill put it: success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

There have been innumerable of you who’ve helped us along the way, and we can only really name a few by name. Many have helped with ideas, enthusiasm, exposure, and guidance. We’re particularly grateful to our investors, who’ve supported us financially and who’ve continued to believe in us throughout. Special shout-outs to Eric Di Benedetto, our lead investor and board member, and Esther Dyson, a key investor and advisor.

BlogRovR isn’t going away. If anything, it’ll benefit from the improvements we keep making to the underlying technology, from the talent at Buzzlogic, and from their mighty hardware too.

Just as importantly, we remain committed to respecting our users’ privacy: we’ve been clear all along about what value we deliver as you browse, and we’ve been equally clear about how we use the data we come in contact with in the process of delivering that value: we only use it anonymously and in the aggregate. We don’t store individual click-streams, and instead derive aggregate attention metrics based how you interact with RovR.

Cross-posted to the Activeweave blog.

Social Graph API – Google Code

Blogged with Flock

Tags: socialgraph, api, google code

[...] Zuckerberg’s most important backer, Peter Thiel, does not work on Sand Hill Road. From his offices in San Francisco’s Presidio, he’s set about changing the rules of how startups get funding and how founders make their fortunes. Through his Founders Fund, he has begun issuing “Series FF” shares to the entrepreneurs he backs, giving them the right to sell shares alongside their companies to new investors. Thiel, who felt unjustly treated as the cofounder of PayPal, wants to let his protégés build companies without worrying about how to make rent. Old lions like angel investor Ron Conway will probably view this development with outrage.

Scoop: Mark Zuckerberg cashes out?

Or, as Mashable puts it: nice pocket change for Zuckerberg.

Except it didn’t happen: Valleywag retracted the story.

So much drama for a Saturday.

Tags: startups

Facebook has accepted Microsoft’s investment of $240 million. The deal gives Microsoft a minority stake in the company at about 2%, which also gives Facebook a current valuation of $15 billion.

Facebook Worth $15 Billion, Accepts $240 Million from Microsoft– bub.blicio.us

Tags: web2.0 facebook

As an entrepreneur deep in the trenches of the evolving web (take that, web x.0 versioning zealots!) I should love that stuff: I started our company in that space precisely because I want to make the web a more social, participatory place. And at first glance, it seems we’re finally getting there, with the Internets chattier than ever. There are more and more fantastic options available to publish all sorts of content, from concise status updates to events to full-length blog posts to podcasts to video. And tools to share the goods with friends are mushrooming as well. What’s not to love, right?

Well, something about the pattern emerging right now bugs me. As a whole, I fear the social web ecosystem is currently amplifying the pain rather than actually helping users communicate and interact better. I read an interview with Aaron Swartz a few weeks back, where he mentioned that early Reddit users wrote about spending too much time on the addictive site. Like Aaron, I am not sure this is a good thing. I am hooked on Twitter, for instance, but I hate loving it.

Why? Because as someone not merely out there to kill time, but rather looking for valuable information nuggets, I don’t feel empowered; quite to the contrary, I feel played: since when does it count as progress that I have to manually sift through everybody’s mundane whereabouts just so I don’t miss the rare piece of signal in the noise? Sure, I want to know where the party’s at, but there has to be a better way to find out than following 1,234 users just to catch the few valuable announcements between countless quips about cappuccino runs and BART delay.

Twitter (or Jaiku, for that matter) isn’t a worse offender than others, mind you: I am frantically trying to keep up with numerous meeting trackers and calendars, from Outlook to Google to Yahoo to 30boxes to upcoming, not to mention old school evite. And should I update my profile and connections on Facebook today and on LinkedIn tomorrow, or the other way around? If I also have to watch the life-casting of my 50 closest friends, I might just as well give up on work right now.

My point: massive production overload, lack of any potent filtering. It may be fine for a while, or for die-hard exhibitionists and voyeurs, but I feel like we’re letting users down severely when it comes to having the stuff that matters to them bubble up to the top of their attention.

To answer Mike’s diatribe about the Valley getting rotten because of too much cash, too many parties, I’d say that in terms of innovation, we’re barely getting started: in my view, the point’s not only giving users yet another megaphone, but facilitating interaction, collaboration, online or even (let’s dream a little) in first life. While the promise of a web more participatory is what fires me up, I think we need to seriously ramp up the consumption side of things. And search in its current state is not the answer; it simply isn’t keeping up right now. Yes, I keep tabs on who’s writing about my company with blog search, but what is the Technorati tag for personalized “cool stuff, cool events, or cool people”? What’s really hot, in my view, is a chance to build and deliver that kind of filtering value for users, beyond gimmicks and raw entertainment plays just adding to the noise. What do you think?

But then, here’s a question for those minds, logical or not: why can’t we seem to make use of those same deductive skills when it comes to grasping a shared, solid, and essential understanding of those market needs, and of the technological challenges in meeting them? When it’s time to devise the all-important, the critical strategies we build our products and bet our careers on, why do we tolerate so much hand waiving, so many approximations, and put up with so blatantly missing logical steps?

Of course, complexity is an obvious suspect. The tasks of exhaustively analyzing customer demographics and problems, of tying these to market sizes and growth rates, and then of figuring out the best ways to address the most valuable needs using technologies available to us appears simply daunting.

Surprisingly enough though, complexity doesn’t seem to be discouraging us, or even slowing us down: thousands of product managers, marketing gurus and strategists (not to mention the ever-fascinating evangelists) are busy slicing and dicing and making sense of all this. Of those, the mediocre are ineffectual, the worst so myopic they will drive any project into the ground, and we view the best as mythical, visionary heroes, whose prophecies we accept to follow somewhat blindly, because even they cannot quite break their views down into a complete, logical, contained analysis.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I love good story telling. In fact, I firmly believe that eloquence and oratory skills are a key to success in our business world. However, do they have to substitute for sound thinking? If the complexities we face are such that our brains cannot process them entirely, isn’t it time we give ourselves the tools we really need?

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Yet every meeting you sit in (and the more strategic the crowd, the more acute the phenomenon is) quickly turns into an exercise in rhetoric with little attention to the white board or even to the seemingly boring notion of defining the terms we use as unequivocally as possible.

Similarly, while we are all aware of the power of diagrams to convey meaning efficiently, we spend a large proportion of our time writing and storing email messages away in fast-aging mailboxes. These messages (often in the form of streams of consciousness that fit so well the monologue model of weblogs) lack the structure and the concept definitions that would allow us to turn them into actual exchanges building shared knowledge.

I see a number of possible improvements we can make, leveraging several technologies still under-utilized today: of course, the wiki concepts (if not their typically raw look-and-feel) constitute one of the founding blocks of such a potential tool.

In addition, an advanced notification mechanism, traversing links or better yet reverse-links, is required to let a group know about changes in a particular area of the knowledge base and their possible effects on neighboring notions.

We need this reverse-link traversal paradigm in order to capture causality in the system and give it a way to evaluate the implications of change. This is where we can really start tapping into our CPUs to supplement our brains in order to keep track of logical connections.

In addition, as we start characterizing links (in order to designate various causal relationships between concepts), we need to be more systematic about these concepts themselves. Consequently, the semantic web technologies (in particular the taxonomy aspects) are a third critical element of such a knowledge building tool, as they let us capture meaning in a structured fashion intelligible not only to the human reader but to software.

Finally, adequate representation is essential, as it is the key to efficiently communicating concepts.

None of these technologies has been widely adopted yet, but I think spending energy building the tool that lets us bridge them and systematically communicate using this combination will be a better investment of our effort and time, and will tremendously speed our work when it comes to establishing and maintaining strategies.