We’re only a month away from the launch of our thought networking service. On this blog, I’ve outlined our vision of thought networking as a new category of semantic applications. With thought networking, we want to help consumers effortlessly collect their thoughts and bend the Internet around them. Leading up to our launch, I want to summarize our vision for this service and our motivations for creating it.

Addressing a Pervasive Problem

The problem with today’s Internet is that it is imposed on consumers. Information is organized for them in advance, without their input. Consumers are treated not as individuals but as amorphous collections of audiences. Producers spend massive amounts of money trying to guess what their audiences need, and compensate for the gaps with monolithic websites and complicated tools to sift through it all.

A much better approach would put the horse in front of the cart, allowing individual consumers to dictate how the information should be organized for them. Simply ask them, “What are you thinking about?” and make those thoughts the organizing force behind it all. Computers could then wield these concrete representations of our thoughts to reorganize and reconstitute the information for each individual. Producers save money; consumers get the simple, made-to-order Web they deserve.

Semantic Technology in a Leading Role

Semantic technologies provide the means to make this fundamental shift from a producer- to a consumer-centric Internet. By layering semantic data over our information services, consumers can wrap information around their individual perspectives. These technologies can not only search and retrieve existing documents, but synthesize and create new information.

There are daunting challenges of scale and complexity to overcome. Semantically annotated information increases the overall weight of the data by many times. This scalability problem is amplified in consumer applications. Consumers will demand personal semantics tailored to their individual thoughts, and they have neither the skills nor inclination to create these complex data structures on their own.

Given these challenges of massive scale, personalization, and complexity, thought networks will be quite unlike a web of data. They will be emergent and transient, like fleeting thoughts. They will involve consumers as active participants, not passive observers, channeling their consumption of information to the creation of task-oriented semantic networks. The experience of thought networking should be one of empowerment and simplicity.

New Benefits and Opportunities

However daunting the technical challenges, they are dwarfed by the opportunities of this new consumer activity. We don’t need to speculate about the promise and opportunity for pure semantic networks. We have a compelling demonstration in the world’s first mainstream semantic web, Wikipedia. But applications for thought networking extend well beyond existing product classes.

Semantic representations, as a language of thought, will provide consumers with a new mode of creative expression and communication. Semantics can capture their individual perspectives on how information is consumed and transformed to get work done. This narrows the distance between consumers and producers, and makes each consumer a 100% participant in the process.

Thought networking is not a new Wikipedia or semantic search engine. It’s not social networking. In many ways, it’s the antithesis of social networking; a new class of product giving identity to our thoughts, making them concrete, autonomous, and actionable. And in dealing with these smallest of entities, thought networking services will eventually comprise massive networks, generating vast amounts of media for commercialization as consumers collect and express their thoughts online.

Our Product Launch

We look forward to presenting our initial foray into thought networking next month. It is an unapologetically new product, a little wobbly like all first steps. But it’s less of a demonstration than an invitation. We’re looking for people who are excited by these ideas and this direction. If you’d like to help forge this new product, as an alpha tester, prospective employee, or partner, please subscribe to this blog, share your comments, and register for an alpha account to get involved.

Thanks to the team at Primal Fusion for their help with this post.