eTech05: Making Web Services Personal

Ben Trott, co-founder of SixApart, the creators of MovableType, presented this afternoon at eTech. Talking on the subject of building personal web services, he talked about building tools for personal use.

Remixing of code, not content, though not with an eye towards replacing existing web services, but rather with an eye towards personal use and development.

There are lots of APIs out there, along with tons of RSS feeds, plus geo-location data, and this is all waiting for folks to utilize as the basis for new and interesting services.

There are many libraries, in most programming languages, to facilitate such development, and Ben goes on to give a couple of examples.

The first one is a personal friends aggregator, which is a page that lists all posts from your friends. Details in the slides if you wish to build a similar tool.

Another example is a feed splicer. It’s a simple tool, and joins together all feeds from one person who posts on multiple sites.

In summary, this presentation did provide a few ideas for folks who are looking to implement simple web services for either personal use or as an educational project.

One of the most enjoyable eTech presentations was the return of last year’s Life Hacks talk. Like last year it covered a wide range of topics related to techniques that geeks and hackers worldwide use to increase their personal effectiveness.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a seat (the talk was SRO), and so didn’t take any notes. However, all is not lost, as Phil Windley took some excellent notes on Life Hacks, which I encourage you to read.

Google announced a new web site at eTech, Google Code.

It’s appears to be an open-source portal, with a focus on google technologies such as their API, info on their open source involvement, and so on.

Chris DiBona, google’s open source program manager introduced the site and then ran through a brief list of current projects.

One of the meta tracks here at eTech seems to be “a peak inside modern software research labs”. Today, we heard from Ask Jeeves.

Ask Jeeves provides an alternate search engine. In their words, not better than google, just different.

Ask Jeeves Alpha, a double-secret codename for their research group. They will eventually have a public-facing site.

New technologies:

* Related Topics
* Clustering of Related Topics
* New image search

Teoma, their search technology, tries to a more category/conceptual based lookup. Sounds a bit like the beginnings of semantic search?

Uses a hubs and authorities approach to perform the breakdown and analysis. This is layered with traditional results to provide the final answer.

He’s talking about the benefits of their ExpertRank system, and mentions “expert validation”. I’ll be listening to learn how this works, and if the experts are human, how it will scale.

In his example, Teoma returned sites with content, and google returned sites with more links to content. Interesting.

Discusses the iterative nature of most searches and how they can use the Related Topics feature to provide better results. Plus, google has a related topics search as well, so … ahh, he addresses that. Google still doesn’t return conceptual or topic results, just keyword results. I guess the key here is, if it works, Teoma/Ask Jeeves intends to provide topic/concept search. That would be a good thing!

(yeah, this talk is a mix of technical and marketing info. Still, the point is that search is not “done” yet; there’s plenty of room for improvement. Also, what’s w/Britney? She was used as an example in the Long Tail talk earlier today.)

Turning to their new image search, it seems they are not only spidering based on metadata, but are also using communities (unspecified how) to derive context for images. Hmmm …

The founder of Teoma provided a brief background on their technology and a demonstration of these technologies. Teoma was founded on the concept of topic/conceptual based search, and expanded into the use of “communities” for deriving context.

The clustered search results shown in the demo did look very powerful; I look forward to the day when this is released from their labs. It will be interesting as 3rd parties compare these new technologies with ones from competitors such as MSN, Yahoo and google.

The talk ended with a brief preview of their new image search. More info is available on their blog, particulary in this post.

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, gave spoke at eTech on the topic of the economics of the Long Tail. The Long Tail refers to a distribution curve that has many points to the right of the curve. The number of different words folks use to find this site demonstrate the Long Tail; at any given time, a few hundred of the past thousand visitors came after searching for a single word or phrase. That is, over 10 folks came looking for my Challa bread recipe, but many hundreds came for different topics.

Rather than try and recapture this talk in a few short words, it’s probably more worth your time to read the Long Tail article itself.

Given the sheer number of people in the world, with so many different ways of approaching life, there is a real opportunity for those who pay attention to the Long Tail and its implications.

Examples of the Long Tail in action include eBay, where you can sell virtually anything! Also, the google adwords program, where ads are explicitly tailored to match the content on the page where they are displayed. All this is related to the slightly older concept of “mass markets of one”.

Chris explores these topics in more detail on his blog.

In the discussion that followed this talk, one of the founders of Excite mentioned that part of the reason Excite went out of business was that they didn’t appreciate the Long Tail. Though most of their queries were similar to what I see on this site, unique words/terms, their advertising model was more traditional, and aimed at the head. Unfortunately, there was no real head, and so no monies were made. Contrast to google where the adwords are very specifically tied to a particular, often Long Tail in nature, web page.