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Explorers examine a crevasse on Lyman Glacier in 1916. (Photo courtesy of the United States Forest Service. Archived at the World Data Center for Glaciology, Boulder, CO.)

I do not know how long the BBC has relied on an outside site to host and hold conversations about their articles. I believe that BBC’s decision — or any site’s — to fracture their content stream by choice is a bad idea.

Why? Because it makes users have to leave their site — why would they want that — and log into another site just to read and post comments about an article. As some of us do not have Facebook accounts by choice (like me), it also means that they are alienating some people from the conversation.

Fracturing By User

Whereas fracturing your own Stream by choice is not a good idea, sometimes it is the users who fracture your commenting stream.

One well-known and respected VC, Mark Suster (G+, T), has publicly stated that he does not like to announce his blog posts on Google Plus or Facebook as it fractures the conversation stream. People would comment on his post within his Google Plus or Facebook thread but not bother to reply on his blog post. He wisely prefers to have the conversation stream occur in one place — on his blog. That way it can easily be accessible to all, and moderated by him. So instead of using Google Plus to announce his newest postings, he relies on Twitter as it is suited to broadcasting about his posts.

I, too, have debated the desirability of announcing my latest blog articles on Google Plus as 95% of the comments I receive occur on my Google Plus thread and not within my blog post. I have made the observation before that Twitter is more a broadcast platform and Google Plus is more of a conversation ecosystem. Mark’s experiences and mine seem to back up this assertion.

You run the risk of giving your readers the opportunity to fracture your article’s conversation stream if you announce it on Google Plus or Facebook. To prevent that from happening while still benefiting from announcing their posts on social networking sites, some bloggers will turn off commenting within Google Plus and Facebook and ask their readers to leave comments on their original posting.

Are There Solutions?

As long as there are multiple Stream Channel providers, the reality of Stream fracturing will remain. However, fracturing your own stream on purpose, as the BBC does, seems like a bad idea. But, it is something that you can control. Preventing others from fracturing your own stream can be a little more difficult as readers can repost or reshare your content and create new channels of conversation that are divorced from the original content bucket.

It is clear that part of the issue with fracturing of streams in the blogging has to do with the outdate paradigm of blogging engines. I wrote about the need for blogging to evolve in my article, It’s Time for Blogging to Evolve. In that article, I propose a path toward making blogging a fully-integrated member in the real-time social web.

Other Articles of Mine On Stream Fracturing

Is Surrogate Blogging via Google Plus a Good Idea?

How Many Streams Can You Kayak At Once?

BitNami offers a variety of development and production stacks that make it quick and easy to set up a localhost-based development environment or even provision a production-based server with a full suite of tools. If you are familiar with the better known MAMP, offered by the German company appsolute GmbH, then you should have no issues using BitNami’s version instead.

What are the benefits of using BitNami’s MAMPStack?

First, as of the date of this article, their stack is up to date. It is compiled and built with the most recent, stable versions of PHP, Apache, MySQL, and phpmyadmin. Second, they offer a very easy-to-install PostgreSQL addon module that integrates into the MAMPStack. This provides the opportunity to use an alternative database, even leveraging PHP’s PDO extension to create a truly SQL-agnostic application. It should not be too hard in the future to add support for other open source SQL-based RDBMSs like Percona or even Drizzle. Third, they seem very responsive to their user community.

Why would you want to integrate MongoDB into your MAMPStack?

The days when a RDBMS could be the end all and be all of your backend are over. For more on this point, read part three of my five-part Smartup series, Web 3.0 Smartups: Moving Beyond the Relational Database.

In short, in the Social Web, smartups cannot use a RDBMS as their only backend tool for every job. A RDBMS is not a universal tool. In fact, RDBMSs — MySQL in particular — are overused and often misused.

Let’s Get Started!

Integrating MongoDB into your BitNami MAMPStack is a relatively straightforward process — at least if you are a developer accustomed to building and modifying your dev stacks. Reading this article will take you some time. But, once you fully understand this process, it should take no more than fifteen minutes to install and configure MongoDB to work within your BitNami MAMPStack.

How do I know? Because before posting this article, I deleted my BitNami MAMPStack using the uninstall.app application with which it ships. This deleted all the work I did in integrating MongoDB into the stack. I then reinstalled the stack and repeated the process below. Of course, I had backup copies of the BitNami MAMPStack because there is no need to redownload that. But, I did go through the entire below process. Total time? Thirteen minutes and four point six seconds — and that is with two MAMPStack server restarts. Bam!

Disclaimer: Before you begin, you agree that you have read this disclaimer and the next one and agree with them. You understand that you are entirely on your own with this process. If you are not comfortable with UNIX commands, if you have never worked within Terminal before, if you do not know how the steps listed below will affect your computer, and if you do not know how to fix any issues that may arise out of trying out these steps, then do not proceed. I am not responsible for what happens to your computer as a result of these suggested techniques. You have been warned. Proceed at your own risk.

Disclaimer 2: This process should not be used on production servers. It is only suitable for a development environment running on localhost.

A. Compiling the MongoDB PHP Driver From Source

Grab the very latest version of the MongoDB PHP Driver. Download the tarball version.

(Note: Although you can try installing the driver using PHP’s PECL command, I’ve had spotty luck with that approach in the past when attempting to install MongoDB into a third-party dev stack. The driver did not always get installed in the proper location. Sometimes it got installed in the extension directory of the default version of PHP that ships with OS X. When that happens, you have to uninstall the driver and try reinstalling it into the proper directory. As this has proven unreliable in the past, I find it easiest to compile from source then move the extension into the proper location within the MAMPStack. It just takes a few more minutes but ensures that everything is in its proper place.)

Drag the tarball out of your Downloads folder onto your desktop. Then double click on the mongo-x.x.x.tar tarball to extract the files. This will create the driver folder. Open up Terminal and navigate to that folder. Each line below starting with a “$” indicates a new terminal command. Before beginning, see the notes below the ordered list. Enter these commands one at a time in Terminal:

NOTE: You may need to change the mampstack version number below if you are installing a newer version — in other words, a version that came out after this article was posted or updated. It is currently updated for MAMPStack version 5.3.10-1 and PostgreSQL Module Addon 5.3.10-1.

1. $ cd /Users/{your_user_name}/Desktop

2. $ ls

3. $ cd mongo-x.x.x

4. $ cd mongo-x.x.x

5. $ sudo /Applications/mampstack-5.3.10-1/php/bin/phpize

6. $ ./configure

7. $ sudo make install

Terminal Notes

Step 1: Replace {your_user_name} with the name of your mac account user. It is the name that appears within the /Users folder.

Step 2: The list command will allow you to double check the MongoDB file folder name which you will enter in the next step.

Step 3: Switch to the directory that contains your MongoDB PHP Driver and associated files. Replace the x.x.x with the version number of the driver which should be the same as that listed for the folder name.

Step 4: This seems like a repeat of above, but if you inspect the folder structure of the driver download, you will see what is going on. This switches into the directory within the downloaded folder that contains the actual driver source files. It is within this directory that you run the compile commands.

Step 5: The phpize command prepares the build environment for PHP extensions — in this case, for building the MongoDB PHP Driver extension (mongo.so). You will be prompted to enter your administrator password. This is your mac user account password (assuming that you are the owner of the mac).

When the screen of output is finished, you will have a compiled MongoDB Driver extension located in the modules directory of the driver folder. Look in /mongo-x.x.x/mongo-x.x.x/modules for the extension named mongo.so. Copy that extension into the following folder in your BitNami MAMPStack directory:

mampstack-5.3.10-1/php/lib/php/extensions

Now you need to add the following to your listed extensions within the php.ini file. In the BitNami MAMPStack, the php.ini file can be found here:

mampstack-5.3.10-1/php/etc

Open the php.ini file in your favorite IDE and add this to the “Dynamic Extensions” section of the file, just below the last active extension:

extension=mongo.so

Save and close the php.ini file.

Now, before continuing on to the next step, if your MAMPStack server is running, stop it and then restart it. Visit your phpinfo page to make sure that the MongoDB PHP Driver has been installed and is active. If you don’t know what a phpinfo page is, visit this link. (I made my PHP Info Page and placed it at root level in the apache2/htdocs folder before I began this process.) Run your phpinfo page and look for the “Configuration” section in the output. Now scroll down until you see “mongo”. Check to make sure the version number is what you expect.

If you do not see “mongo” listed, or the version number is incorrect, you’ll have to start the process again — but first you will need to delete the mongo.so file from BitNami MAMPStack’s PHP extension folder. However, if everything looks fine, you’re ready for the next section below — part two.

B. Adding and configuring the MongoDB Database

In this section, we’ll setup the MongoDB backend and make sure that it is functioning properly.

Follow these simple steps:

1. Download the most recent, stable OS X 64-bit binary version of MongoDB. Double click the tarball to extract the files.
2. Create a new folder called “mongo” in BitNami MAMPStack’s root. When you are done, you will have this directory structure: mampstack-5.3.10-1/mongo
3. Create three subfolders in this newly-created mongo folder, setting their permissions to 775:

   bin

   data

   tmp

   Within the newly-created data directory, add the following subfolder with permissions set to 775 as well:

   db

4. Install the MongoDB files you’ve just downloaded and extracted into the mampstack-5.3.10-1/mongo/bin. Make sure you install just the contents of the bin folder within the downloaded MongoDB folder and not the bin folder too.
5. Next, you’ll create a configuration file for mongoDB. This file will tell mongo where to store data, log errors, and which directory to use for temporary stuff. In your favorite IDE, create a new file named mongodb.conf in the root directory of your mongo install ( mampstack-5.3.10-1/mongo ). In that file, add the following:

   Important Note: You can copy the entire text below and paste it into your new, empty mongodb.conf file. However, before saving and closing this file, make sure there are no spaces on the blank lines between the code blocks. If you have even a single space on a blank line — or even after a command line — your Mongo server will not start up as it will believe the line with a space is a command line. It will not know how to interpret this phantom command. So, when attempting to start your Mongo server in step 6 below, if you receive this error, error command line: unrecognized line in ‘ ’, that means you have a space somewhere in this file. Find it, delete it, and try again. As much as I tried, I could not get the Syntax Highlighter to create the below text without adding an extra space between lines.

   # Store data in default MongoDB directory structure, /data/db/
   dbpath = /Applications/mampstack-5.3.10-1/mongo/data/db
   
   # Set location where all MongoDB errors should be logged.
   # This should create a log file if it does not exist
   logpath = /Applications/mampstack-5.3.10-1/mongo/mongodb.log
   
   # Set location of pid file; this should create one if it does not exist
   pidfilepath = /Applications/mampstack-5.3.10-1/mongo/tmp/mongo.pid
   
   # Only accept local connections
   bind_ip = 127.0.0.1

   Save and close your newly-created mongodb.conf file.

6. To launch MongoDB server, open up terminal and type the following command all on one line. However, as we have just made significant additions and changes to the basic, out-of-the-box BitNami MAMPStack, you need to restart your BitNami MAMPStack servers to make sure all the changes are picked up.

   Once the MAMPStack servers have restarted, type this into Terminal — place your cursor in the box and copy the entire string as it does extend beyond the margins of the box:

   sudo /Applications/mampstack-5.3.10-1/mongo/bin/mongod --config=/Applications/mampstack-5.3.10-1/mongo/mongodb.conf

   Please note: From now on, this is how you will start your mongod server.

7. Test your MongoDB install to make sure that the server is running. By default, MongoDB listens to port 27017. You can verify which port MongoDB is listening to by looking up the configuration settings of your MongoDB PHP Driver in the PHP Info page. However, Mongo’s Web-based admin console listens to port 28017. Therefore by visiting “localhost:28017” in your browser, you can see if you have a connection. If you do, you’re all set!

To learn more about starting and stopping the MongoDB server (Mongod), see this resource.

(Note: You could install MongoDB into your /usr/local/ directory and then symlink the binaries out of the /usr/local/mongo/bin folder to the BitNami MAMPStack. However, the idea in this method is to keep all the applications bundled under the same master folder — your BitNami MAMPStack. That way, uninstalling the stack is very simple. You just delete the BitNami MAMPStack folder from your /Applications directory. The method presented here also makes it easy to move this application setup to another machine. Finally, although it is normally not an issue, with this method you do not have to worry about potential problems when upgrading your OS.)

C. Download and install phpMoAdmin

We are almost finished! If you’ve successfully completed parts one and two above, congratulations! You have integrated MongoDB to run inside of your BitNami MAMPStack. This last step will provide you with a tool to manage MongoDB.

Just as you use phpmyadmin to administer and manage your MySQL databases, MongoDB has several database admin tools written in PHP. We’re going to be installing phpMoAdmin. Grab the most recent stable version.

Once you’ve downloaded a copy, unzip it if it did not automatically unzip. Next, create a new folder within Apache’s htdocs folder called phpmoadmin. Copy the moadmin.php file into this new folder.

Done! You now can access this very simple, but useful MongoDB admin tool by visiting “localhost:8080/phpmoadmin/moadmin.php” in your browser.

Alternatively, you can use MongoHub or RockMongo to administer your MongoDB backend. I suggest checking all three out and deciding which one you like best.

Why are we using phpMoAdmin? It offers the most recently-updated version out of the three and it is simple to install as it is a single, small file. For this article, it is sufficient. However, the other tools may provide better GUIs and a stronger set of features. So, you should check them out and decide which one you like best.

Don’t Forget to Give Thanks!

That’s it!

You can further expand your BitNami MAMPStack by setting up VHOSTs in your Apache config file, but that is beyond this article. If you’re interested in that, see the documentation in the /apache2/manual folder.

Finally, please remember to give back to the open source community as it provides you with high-quality, powerful software with many freedoms — and often free as in cost, too. Share this article, write your own, create a version of this article for Linux distros or Windows, volunteer time to an open source project, contribute bug fixes, thank BitNami for their services, or donate to help fund an open source project. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) needs your support!

Now go out there and create the next, greatest Smartup!

More resources

• Learn more about MongoDB
• MongoDB books
• Blending the Doctrine ORM with the Doctrine MongoDB ODM

I see the issues of Internet censorship, access rights, and content reuse as part of a much larger phenomenon that many people are unaware. Whereas the Internet has been a revolutionary force in humanity’s communication capabilities, facilitating numerous societal, cultural, political, and economic changes, I believe that it is the emerging evolutionary changes fueled by the accelerating growth in technology that will bring about the most radical and fundamental transformation.

Let me lead you through my thinking.

The Internet as a Right

Today I’ve seen this article by Vint Cerf posted twice to my Google Plus Stream, Internet Access Is Not a Human Right (independently posted by Tim O’Reilly and John Blossom). John Blossom’s post and ensuing comments present a well-reasoned argument on why access to the Internet should be considered a human right. Discussing the seminal insights in America’s First Amendment (freedom of speech, freedom of the press), John successfully argues that the right to unfettered Internet access is a natural extension of these two rights.

This issue was thrown into the spotlight in the middle of last year when the United Nations’ Human Rights Council declared that access to the InterWeb was a basic, global human right. Vint Cerf, on the other hand, makes his case in his article why he believes that is an improper viewpoint.

I agree with the UN’s declaration and respectfully disagree with Vint Cerf’s reasoning. To me, however, this debate misses a larger issue — the Internet is transforming in profound ways that push this discussion beyond the simple notion of access rights.

The Internet as a Cultural and Spiritual Resource

Also floating by in my Google Plus Stream this morning was this article (shared by Kingsley Idehen), about the Missionary Church of Kopimism being approved as an official religion in Sweden.

In my rehashing of Kingsley’s post, I mused about the possible ramifications the religion of Kopimism could have in the United States on the SOPA / PIPA legislative process. I asked if, “policy makers [could] be infringing on [freedom of religion] and the separation of church and state by trying to regulate the Internet and its activities.”

In the article about Kopimism, I found this statement very intriguing:

It makes perfect sense to observe that all life comes from copying and remixing of previous life, and to therefore hold copying and remixing as higher, sacred acts worthy of reverence…People who have observed that copying and remixing is the basis for all our being deserve every bit of respect for considering those acts connected with life itself.

(Note: Here is another article on this issue, A Few Thoughts on Kopimism as a Religion)

This is an interesting perspective. Of course biological life maintains and perpetuates itself via mitosis and meiosis. Our past cells and current self can only survive via the copying and passing on of genetic information. Evolution proceeds via the copying and mixing of various genes and through creation of novel genes thanks to mutations. Copying is also fundamental to disseminating and perpetuating software, content, knowledge, ideas, and cultural memes.

Thus copying can be viewed as something that transcends the myopic view of intellectual property protection and its strict enforcement of infringement laws. Censorship and a reduction of access rights to the Internet eschews the higher-level cultural and spiritual import of our social interactions on the InterWeb.

I suppose it could be argued that copying, remixing, sharing, and disseminating are at the core of the fabric of the universe. So how is the Internet moving past the basic issue of access rights and evolving into a more holistic manifestation of our biological and universal predilections to copy, share, disseminate and connect?

The Emerging Global Brain

As the growth of computing technology accelerates at an accelerating rate, the tools and means with which our species communicates will radically change. Already at least one billion people are emotionally connected and attached to their social media networks and obsessively enamored with their smart devices. At least a billion people more covet the notion of being connected in the same way.

For those of us intimately tied into the Social Web, our connection and devices might as well be a permanent piece of our neural anatomy. In my article, Who Should Own the Internet, I make this observation:

The Internet has become our global data ecosystem. It is an evolutionary force in the speciation of humanities’ communication and computation infrastructure. As a result of the ease with which data of all types flows around the global, and with the increasing connections made to this data on a daily basis, our species is on the verge of seismic and profound changes.

In just a few decades, the Internet has grown like a developing nervous system, transcending national boundaries, shrinking geographic distances, dissolving geopolitical barriers, and binding many of us together into a single, global network. If allowed to continue its course unshackled by shortsighted power players, then it may become humankind’s most powerful, liberating, unifying, and transformational force.

As our computing and communication technologies become smaller, more powerful, cheaper, and ubiquitous, humanity will begin to merge with these tools. Currently, we have superficially merged with our communication tools, but in a few decades, we will have augmented reality interfaces in our glasses and contact lenses, various Internet-enabled sensors in our bodies, and a copious amount of micro sensors providing reams of data from the Web of Sensors—a global mesh network of sensors.

At some point, the Global Brain will come to life. It will be part organic, part inorganic. It will be part us and part our creations. It will be a universal communications binding whose existence is greater than the sum of its parts.

(Note: I go into more detail about the Global Brain in my thought piece, Cybernetics, the Social Web, and the (Coming?) Singularity)

Because of this belief, in my Who Should Own the Internet article, I put forth my view of the needs of the Internet as follows:

…the Internet [should be] granted its own rights and freedoms—freedoms to grow, to prosper, to evolve unencumbered by corporate or governmental red tape as if it were its own emerging metaphysical entity.

In the coming decades, humanity’s sojourns and journeys across the Social Web will transform as the technological and cultural seismic shift in global communication patterns and infrastructure brings use closer together and intimately connects us. The Internet is evolving in ways that may be currently hard to comprehend. If the global netizenry does not stand up for its rights and those of an unencumbered Internet, then corporate greed, myopic political leaders, and misplaced fear will prevent humanity from achieving an amazing future.

My Related Articles

1. The HyperWeb: it’s All About Connections
2. Cybernetics, the Social Web, and the (Coming?) Singularity
3. Who Should Own the Internet?

The current Web has moved past the point where personal blogging is a big focus into the realm of real-time (RT) social interaction. Most content is now generated and shared via RT social networks than on CMS-based systems. However, unlike a CMS’s focus on content, the RT social networks’ focus is on users and their Streams.

No longer is it sufficient to place content at the center of a system’s model. Instead, the RT Social Web demands that users have primacy, that their content preferences, that their Stream choices and channels, are just a part of their overall presence on the Web.

Instead of blogging-1.0 styled CMSs, the paradigm has shifted to what I call User Stream Manager (USM) systems. A USM places the user at the center of the system, not the user’s content.

One such USM is Bottlenose, a self-described tool ”that helps you engage with your streams more intelligently.” Bottlenose was founded by Nova Spivack (T, G+) , a prolific Venture Producer, and Dominiek ter Heide (T, G+), a very talented developer and CTO.

I’ve been privy to Bottlenose’s development for more than a year, watching it evolve into a more robust, well-envisioned Stream management tool — a USM. Although I have not used it on a daily or weekly basis, I’ve kept an eye trained on its progress, stepping back in every so often to test its waters.

I just did so again last week and all I can say is Bottlenose will become my default real-time Stream management system. I’ve grown tired of TweetDeck, HootSuite, and other social media dashboards. Whereas Bottlenose is still a nascent platform and therefore should not be compared apples to apples with the aforementioned dashboards, it’s future prospects are greater in my opinion.

Bottlenose’s foundation embraces Web 3.0; the company lives in what I call the Smartup space. The technology and the company are leading the way toward the era of the User Stream Manager. As consummate Smartup practitioners, they’re aiming at building an ecosystem around their core technology, including the ability for 3rd-party plugins to enhance the Bottlenose experience. Add to this the possibility of an app store, and you have a smartup that not only will monetize in a smart way, but share some of their financial success with other developers.

There is a lot of low-level, amazing, and cool technology that churns underneath Bottlenose’s surface, helping to sort out the flotsam and jetsam in your Stream from the treasures. Their proprietary tech helps extract the signal in your Stream from the noise in your channels. It learns what you like and dislike. It allows you to teach it how you prefer paddling your reach of the RT social river.

Currently, Bottlenose’s oars, rudders, and keel are just in the Twitter and Facebook Streams. As it continues to evolve, hopefully adding additional Streams into the mix (Google Plus, Quora), its utility will only increase and each user’s journey down their RT social Stream will become more meaningful.

If you have not yet tried Bottlenose, it’s time for you to jump on in. The water is fine and the flow is just right!

My Related Articles

1. Flocking To the Stream
2. Building the Social Web: the Layers of the Smartup Stack
3. How Many Streams Can You Kayak At Once?
4. The HyperWeb: it’s All About Connections
5. The first article in my five-part smartup series, Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups

I want to address an odd trend–although it’s not yet clear if this actually is a trend. Over the past several months, I’ve heard similar statements from several unrelated Internet startups—the notion that they are not tech startups.

Instead of thinking of themselves as tech startups, they believe they have a higher-calling, claiming to be some flavor of socially-focused company. This may be the result of more and more non-tech-oriented business people forming Internet-based startups, but whatever the cause, in my opinion, it must be nipped in the bud.

Now if I had heard that sentiment from two unrelated parties, I would not think much about it. But hearing that statement from several unrelated parties has made me pause and think.

The Rise of the Data Civilization

In the conclusion of Stephen Wolfram’s excellent article entitled Advance of the Data Civilization: A Timeline, he states that the “systematization of data and knowledge provides core infrastructure for the world.” Technologies have evolved over time, increasing the rate of collection, processing, and dissemination of that data to help turn them into knowledge.

To our globally-connected and insatiably data-hungry community, in my view, the Internet is perhaps the most relevant class of innovation. The Internet is becoming not only the preferred repository of most of our data but also the accelerator of the systematization of data and knowledge that Wolfram discusses. Our civilization is more dependent on data today than ever before—and that dependence will continue to increase.

As humanity races toward the Internet of Things, data–and lots of it (big data)–will be a fundamental supporting sublayer to our everyday lives. The Internet is becoming the platform on which our society, culture, and economy depends. The Internet is an essential partner in much of our current and future innovations. Don’t discount the importance of the Internet and its underlying technologies. Technology is at the core of our society’s future and your smartup’s success.

Technology as Platform, Engine, and Change Agent

All Internet-obligate companies have some type of a vision and mission, usually backed by a set of closely-held ideals that flavor their implementation of that vision. Whatever that vision may be, the fundamental foundation of any smartup is its technological platform. But as you’ll discover in the Layer’s of the Smartup Stack article, the platform does encompass more than just core code technology.

The technological platform though is at the center of, the innermost layer of, the smartup stack. Why is this the case? Because technology is the enabler of the wonderful and fantastic vision your smartup has for the world. Your smartup plans to leverage the power, reach, and socially-transmutational forces of the Internet. To do so requires that you envelope your vision with those technologies that can help bring your vision to fruition.

Whereas it is fabulous that you want to change the world, your Internet-obligate company mandates a technological base. Make sure that base is as strong as it can be. Architect it properly and build it correctly from the start.

Don’t let some branding game cloud your judgement about the key components to your smartup’s future. Remember that your company is at the startup stage. It is not at the growth to maturity stage. You are building the foundation of your vision—a vision that should indisputably be much greater than its technological underpinnings and will be if you do it right. But in order to get to that next stage, you need to come to terms with the seeds of your humble beginnings. There will be plenty of time to expand your focus, to embrace your greater ideals.

Conclusion

It is clear that technology is integral to all Social Web platforms. As smartups are Internet-obligate endeavors, they must be firmly grounded in a tech core. But smartups are greater than the sum of their technologies. The fifth installment of my smartup series lays out the greater ecosystem vision that all startups should strive to embrace. Please read, Building the Social Web: the Layers of the Smartup Stack.

Outside Resources

Here’s a great article by Steve Blank, The Startup Team. The composition of your founding startup team is instrumental to your success — or lack thereof. Technology must be represented on that founding team or you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

As every Trekkie knows, the first Star Trek series was a flop in the eyes of the network executives. The series was canceled into its third session. But it struck a chord with viewers. A letter-writing campaign by fans was responsible for the network re-airing the series and for its eventual syndication. Through syndication and fan-driven Star Trek conventions, the ideals of the series lived on, spawning four more successful series and a growing list of Hollywood movies.

Star Trek struck a chord with viewers for a number of reasons. Through its interracial, intercultural, mixed gender, and mixed species crew, it sent the message that humanity could strive toward a greater ideal, that we would eventually overcome our social, political, and economic conflicts.

The original series (TOS), and the subsequent series in the franchise, also sparked the imaginations of many young children and teenagers, helping them dream about science, technology, and the future. Today there are a number of prominent scientists who have stated that Star Trek was a primary reason they got interested in science and math.

But for the first time in almost two decades, there is not an actively-produced, airing Star Trek series. How can a new generation of viewers get inspired by the ideals and vision of the Trek universe? How should Gene Roddenberry’s vision live on?

To Boldly Go

Whereas there seems to be renewed interest in the Hollywood-side of the Trek franchise, a new Star Trek movie coming out every two or three years is not sufficient to keep fans satiated nor inspire new fans to get interested in math and science. There have been fan-created Trek series going for some time–one of them even attracting the participation of past TOS stars and screenwriters–but these productions cannot pump out the volume of annual episodes required to keep an audience engaged, to keep the vision of Roddenberry alive.

So what is the solution?

I believe that creating a single, new television-based Star Trek series is not in keeping with Gene Roddenberry’s vision. As a futurist, Roddenberry would have been enthralled with the power of today’s Web-based Internet.

Roddenberry would have reached out and embraced the Web, leveraging social media, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and cloud-based distribution. He surely would have recognized that with the new production toolkits and distribution channels, multiple teams of independent production companies could simultaneously leverage the power of the Web to expand and explore his vision.

Instead of a single, very-expensive-to-produce, television-based Star Trek series being aired at a time, imagine eight or ten cheaper-to-produce, independently-run Star Trek Web franchises running simultaneously. Imagine the richness and diversity of Roddenberry’s vision blossoming in the frontiers of Web-based media production.

The Next Production Frontier

CBS Studios–the current copyright holder of the television side of the Star Trek franchise–needs to accept the changing face of media production. It needs to honor and respect Gene Roddenberry’s creation and future-focused vision by putting in place a mechanism for the creation of independently-owned and -operated mini Star Trek Production Houses (STPH).

Note: What I’m proposing for the Star Trek franchise can equally apply to the Stargate franchise as well

The overall goal of the STPH program would be to enable small, for-profit production companies to make a living producing new Star Trek series for a world-wide fanbase. The fans would support each production via subscription fees and merchandise purchases. Only those STPH productions that were deemed worthwhile would garner sufficient fan support to continue production. Here’s how the STPH model would work:

1. Getting Started: Each STPH would be pay an initial small licensing fee to CBS Studios for the rights to use the Star Trek name and body of work in a for-profit venture. An initial two-year license would cost a nominal amount—$10k. This would help the fledgling series get established without too much of their precious initial funding going to licensing. The small fee while affordable, is still large enough that only serious production teams would be willing to pay the initial fee.
2. Licensing Fee Escalation: Starting with year three, licensing could switch to being annually renewable with an escalation of the fee to $25k. Year four would see the fee jump to $50k and year five would see the fee capped at a maximum $100k for that year and each subsequent years. By year three, either a series is doing well enough to afford a higher fee or it is ready to shut down. So, whereas the annual fees in years 4 and onward seem steep compared to the first three years, it is reasonable to assume that a successful series will have more than sufficient annual subscription revenue to easily afford these fees. The increased fees are also a thank you to CBS Studios for allowing young production companies to get up and running without a burdensome initial licensing fee.
3. Production Requirements: Part of the licensing agreement would establish minimum production requirements that ensure sufficient quality of production output. However, the minimum production requirements should not be a deal killer; they cannot require too expensive of a production toolset; they cannot require that actors be screen actor guild members nor that gaffers, lighting technicians (etcetera) be union. The Web-based production paradigm is much closer to guerilla, shoebox, garage-level production than Hollywood-level cinematic overkill. Requiring big-budget television, or worse, Hollywoord-level production capabilities does not recognize nor appreciate the agility with which Web-based productions must operate.
4. Production Quality: Whereas costs must be contained, and therefore old-school media production mindsets will not work in the fasted-paced world of Web productions, there are a few essentials to help ensure sufficient production quality. A list of minimum equipment quality, facilities, and production capabilities would be spelled out in the licensing agreement. This list would cover:

   * Cameras
   * Studio space
   * Sets, props, and costumes
   * Scripts
   * Post production quality, such as VFX capabilites
   * Website design and community requirements
   * Episode formatting for Web broadcast

5. Organizational Structure: Each independent STPH must be a chartered for-profit corporate organization. In other words, it has to be a business and run like a business. It cannot be three guys in their garage making a fan flick.
6. Monetization: Each STPH would utilize crowdfunding to fund their series production. This could be done through a combination of funding techniques, but selling annual subscriptions to a series would be the primary revenue source for each STPH.
7. Profit Sharing: Profit sharing of 70/30 (STPH / CBS Studios). CBS Studios would receive a thirty-precent topline subscription revenue share and a thirty-precent net profit share (on all other revenue streams minus subscription revenue) such as sales of merchandise, DVDs, conferences, onset tours, premium Web member fees, etcetera.
8. Need for Profit: Each STPH Webseries’ creative team and production company need to have sufficient motivation and profit opportunities. They need to have the ability to earn a respectable profit to fund future growth and improvements. A thirty-precent profit share with CBS Studios is more than generous and could add up to a respectable bonus revenue stream all for just agreeing to license the Star Trek brand and let others do the rest of the work.
9. Creative Freedom: Whereas CBS Studios would approve each new licensee and the proposed Webseries’ place in the Star Trek Universe (STU), they would not have creative control over a Webseries’ production. The only control they would have is to refuse license renewal at the end of a licensing period or the ability to revoke a license midterm if other contractual obligations have not been met. The license agreement would have to safeguard the original creative team and STPH company so as to prevent license termination for the sole purpose of taking over a popular Webseries (see last bullet point). There would of course be a set of rules that each Webseries would have to follow regarding the expansion of the STU and also a set of production guidelines that should be followed. But Web-based new media projects cannot function under old school, overly ridged, greatly politicized production policies and practices. In the world of new media there is no room for the old school studio executives playing god. There is no room and allowance for script reviews and approval. Web-based cinema is a lean, quick paced production environment. The reason it exists is to get away from the excesses and gross inefficiencies of old school, traditional media. If CBS Studios wants to succeed in the new media Web world, it has to learn the new rules, it has to change its ways of doing business.
10. Copyright: Each STPH webseries would have a joint copyright between CBS Studios and the STPH Webseries production company with all profits shared as agreed upon in the licensing agreement. The copyright and profit sharing would continue after series completion or termination.
11. Communication, Participation, Marketing: Regular communication would occur between each licensed STPH and CBS Studios. This would be facilitated via a special CBS Studio STPH Envoy. CBS Studios would help market each licensed STPH via promotion on StarTrek.com and other outlets.
12. Potential for Television Series: It may make sense for CBS Studios to directly nurture a select few STPH Webseries, providing them with additional funding, and maybe even turning them into full-fledged Star Trek TV series. This would require careful consideration of the impacts to the STPH company (owners, actors, production team, copyright issues, etcetera).

The Web, Star Trek’s Final Frontier?

Why should CBS Studios entertain this proposal? Besides that it is more than likely in keeping with Gene Roddenberry’s vision, it could provide a nice yearly revenue stream.

It’s realistic to project a possible annual income from all licensed STPH Webseries to approach $36m by the fourth year of this program. With ten active, licensed Star Trek webseries each paying $50k per licensing year, that is $500k in licensing fees in year four alone. Year five would double income from licensing to $1m.

The profit sharing arrangement offers the lion’s share of the opportunity. Assuming each STPH Webseries has at a minimum 500k annual subscribers each paying $20 per year for the privilege of seeing the series, that would make a total of $10 million per series times ten series divided by 30 percent. Therefore the shared revenue split would bring in $30m per annum.

Furthermore, I guesstimate that each successful fourth-season webseries would have a minimum additional net revenue stream of $2 million per annum through merchandising and other avenues. This means an additional $6 million per year to CBS Studios. That may not sound like much money to a mega-media company like CBS, but it would be $36 million dollars per year that CBS would not have otherwise.

The real payoff to CBS Studios may be in keeping Roddenberry’s vision alive and bringing it into the future. With possibly a dozen independent mini Star Trek Production Houses producing hundreds of hours of Web-based programming each year, the franchise will be reinvigorated. Future television-based series, merchandizing, and renewed syndication revenue from past television series could lead to a windfall profit for CBS Studios.

As we celebrate Star Trek’s 45th anniversary, let’s keep Gene Roddenberry’s vision alive and boldly go into a new production frontier.

As a Social Web architect and an open source advocate I frequently write, think, and promote the notion and ideals of the Open and Social Web. My work in the areas of user-centric control (identity, privacy, data portability, and rights), federated Social Web models, future-of-money projects, and W3C standards groups has shaped my views presented here.

Soon after publishing my 4-part smartup series (almost a year ago), I began to think about key parts of what has become this article. I’ve had bits and pieces of this article jotted down in various places. Over the past three months, the ideas have coalesced into a cohesive framework. With a recent and lengthy process of helping a potential smartup try to find its foundation, I’ve been motivated to assemble, clarify, and share my views on what I call the layers of the smartup stack.

If you’ve carefully read my previous installments in my smartup series you will have discovered–in part–the message that is expressed here. This next installment in the series seeks to clearly present the framework of the smartup stack.

Smartups are Socially Transformative

Smartups look to operate beyond the stale disruptive technology mantra; the smartup vision is not simply a paradigm shift. Instead, smartups are best described as innovating at the intersection of technical, social, and cultural evolution. As such, well thought-out and executed smartups are revolutionary entities. They are socially transformative ecosystems.

The power that a corps of ecosystem partners can bring to your smartup’s success cannot be emphasized enough.

The layers of the smartup stack embrace the uniqueness of each smartup while recognizing the interconnectedness of the greater community. In this regard, smartup’s do not build software. Smartup’s create ecosystems. Like an ecological food web, your smartup can be viewed as an organism that is linked to and interdependent upon other organisms and system services. This mindset requires a broader view of your smartup’s role in society. A smartup’s ultimate goal is to create greater value than is captured.

No matter the grand vision of a given smartup, all smartups share the same DNA at their foundation. They are tech-reliant, Internet-obligate companies. If you need some convincing of this fact, please see my article, Putting the Tech Back into Social Web.

The Layers of the Smartup Stack

Whereas technology is at the center of the smartup stack, you will see in this article that smartups are greater than the sum of their technologies. As we explore each additional layer of the smartup stack, the focus shifts more and more to the outside. Greater emphasis is placed on the social, economic, and cultural frameworks. This will help integrate your vision into the real world. It will help bridge your metaspace creations with their meatspace participants.

Layers can connote horizontal levels upon which other material is placed or stacked. But in the view presented here, layers are rings that surround and bind to any lower and higher concentric-ring partners.

It is practically impossible to singularly architect and build each of the smartup layers without regard to their immediately contiguous layers. However, I will present each layer as if it were a well-defined and self-sufficient entity. The reality is that at all stages of building out your smartup stack, the interconnections to and interdependencies on other layers (inner and outer) must be carefully explored and considered. This is one reason (among many) why your smartup must have in-house technological expertise from the start.

As mentioned above, smartup’s do not build software, they create ecosystems. They recognize that there is great benefit to being linked to and interdependent upon others in a larger system. As many of the system services are outside of a smartup’s immediate control, a smartup must architect its ecosystem to work in symbiotic harmony with the greater Web community.

To that end, a smartup leverages and relies upon open source tools and open Web standards. As we will discuss in the section about the outermost smartup stack layer, smartups also give back to the Open Web movement in order to embrace an ecosystem approach.

The Inner most Layer: the Technology Platform

As mentioned above, technology is at the very core of every Internet-obligate smartup. The center of the smartup stack, then, is the technology platform. There are four pieces that comprise the technology platform. As previous smartup articles discuss two of these pieces in depth, I will not present much additional detail about them.

Each piece of the tech platform layer relies on Open Source tools and standards where ever possible. Although a smartup creates its own technology in aggregate, it leverages code libraries, tools, and standards to help make the process of building out their platform quick and efficient.

At this stage you will be proportioning your smartup’s time between product iteration (which means more coding), marketing your MVP, and customer development. Although you must find the proper balance between these three activities, the primary focus of this process is on building out your smartup’s foundational technology platform.

Here are the four pieces of the tech platform:

1. Schemaless Backend
2. Semantic Web / LOD Stack
3. Responsive Codebase
4. Modern Web Standards

Schemaless Backend

I’ve written an entire smartup article on the virtues of NOSQL versus SQL, so I will not repeat anything here except to say that some smartups may need to use an RDBMS as well for part of their overall data warehousing needs. The main point is that smartups are big-data players and as such they need to utilize the best technology for modeling, capturing, and managing that data. NOSQL databases are, by and large, the preferred choice.

Semantic Web / LOD Stack

I’ve also written an entire smartup article on the Web of Data. Suffice it to say that Semantic Web technologies, which some prefer to refer to as Linked Data technologies, enable the linking of data and allows for the serendipitous discovery of new connections with other datasets.

Smartups understand the value of and participate in the Web of Data. Smartups realize that data is the unit of exchange on the Web, not documents. Instead of Hyperlinks being the engine of exchange, it is Hyperdata. Data is the energy, the food, exchanged between participants in the Social Web. Semantic Web technologies facilitate the flow of information between “habitats”, between communities.

Responsive Codebase

This is the most generic-sounding piece in the tech platform layer. I will not delve too much into this piece of the tech platform layer as it deserves its own full-length article (perhaps the sixth installment in my smartup series).

There is not one preferred or recommended framework, language construct, or codebase that all smartups use. Different smartups use different code-creating tools. They pick those that they are most comfortable with and that serve their particular tech needs. However, there are some clear trends and, therefore, advice that can be offered to each smartup.

The broadest bit of advice is that Internet-coding technologies are evolving to catch up with and meet the needs of a more data-intensive world. Although a smartup CTO should use tools with which he or she feels comfortable, that does not mean that they can be complacent, that they should not spend time exploring and learning some of the newer options.

For instance, a smartup will choose an object-oriented coding style versus a procedural-coding style. But that does not mean that all smartups have to code in PHP, Python, or Ruby. There are some promising, new, convention-breaking language platforms that are the current rage in the Web dev world. One of these is NodeJS—a highly-scalable, high-concurrency, event-driven framework.

Another major smartup trend that epitomizes the Responsive Codebase mantra is moving as much of the processing away from the server side as possible (Web-1.0 and 2.0s thick-server approach). The focus is on creating what are referred to as fat- or thick-client applications. In other words, the browser or mobile device handles considerable more of the processing, relying a lot less on the server.

Another trend is the use of light-weight code libraries. When properly utilized, they allow a smartup to react more quickly and be nimble in their coding practices. As an example, one light-weight code library that my newest smartup uses is JSON-LD. It brilliantly facilitates cross-piece integration and as such can be categorized as falling into both pieces two and three in the tech platform layer.

A final smartup trend is preferred data formats. According to a recent report, 55 percent of all new APIs have support for JSON and a staggering 20 percent of new APIs support only JSON. This demonstrates the quickly-growing trend of utilizing JSON as a preferred data format (see slides 22 & 23). It also indicates that for data interchange, the reliance on XML is fading fast.

Modern Web Standards

Smartups support, adopt, and utilize Web standards. HTML5 and CSS3 are currently among the two most important Web standards. There are of course other standards, whose utility will vary among smartups, but these two should be utilized by all smartups.

The Second Layer: User-control and Economic Engine

The next layer of the smartup stack contains two sublayers that interconnect via their direct connections with the technology platform. Once again, this illustrates the importance of the technology platform as being a fundamental, foundational layer to all smartups.

These two sublayers are:

1. User-centric Rights & Control
2. Future-looking Economic Engine

User-centric Rights & Control

As I have written much about user-centric control over identity, privacy, usage rights, and data portability in the past, I will gloss over most of the details. If you’re interested in learning more about my viewpoints on these topics, simply search my website.

All smartups believe in and understand the importance of returning as much control over data as possible back to the users. They realize that it not only makes sense from the standpoint of being good social stewards, but also it makes good business sense as well.

With support from the smartup’s tech platform, users have significant power over each piece of data that they contribute, that they generate. Further support for users’ rights and control can be provided through novel, user-friendly legal contracts.

Future-looking Economic Engine

I’ve been interested in future-of-money projects and theories for sometime—particularly in how technology, specifically Internet tech, is leading to a revolution in how value is exchanged. This is why I am a charter member of the newly-announced W3C Web Payments Standards Community Group.

I believe that new micropayment frameworks and economic models are essential to not only the healthy growth and long-term viability of a truly Social Web, but also to our greater global society. The future of money and of economic self reliance rests in the emergent properties of the social-driven superorganism. Centrally-controlled currencies will eventually give rise to decentralized currencies and instead of tightly controlled and regulated markets, self-regulation via distributed command and control processes will become the norm.

Smartups are on the bleeding edge of this economic revolution. Smartups thus play an important part in helping to push new payment frameworks and economic models. They are intimately involved in evolving economic models and understanding the need for a universal payment mechanism for the Web—a mechanism that will facilitate the proliferation of alternative currencies, friction-less payments, crowdfunding, and general value exchange.

One payment framework that my smartup will be leveraging is PaySwarm. It is described as, “an open standard that enables web browsers and web devices to perform micropayments and copyright-aware, peer-to-peer digital media distribution.” I believe that PaySwarm can become one of the central pillars to any smartup’s future-looking economic engine.

The Third Layer: the Smartup Social Engine

This layer integrates with the innermost two layers of the smartup stack. The focus is more on the user interface (UI) and the user experience (UX).

When combined with the first two layers, this layer comprises what can best be described as the Smartup’s Social Engine. It is the internal platform that contains any intellectual property (IP). It is the fully-functioning application that provides the smartup’s unique product and service offering.

Although basic UI/UX considerations were made during the initial MVP testing, proving, and refinement phase, it was a Lean UI and Lean UX process. The Social Engine Layer is where a smartup spends considerable time perfecting its full-blown UI and UX. Issues such as tight integration with the the User-centric Rights & Control and Future-looking Economic Engine sublayers are addressed. Issues with proper social interaction flow are addressed.

At this level in the smartup stack, the focus begins to shift more toward the outside, toward the physical usage of the service, and not its technical underpinnings. Toward that end, pathways with which others can interact, integrate, and extend the smartups services are developed and engineered. These become the domain of the next layer.

The Fourth Layer: Outward-facing Connections

A key vision of the smartup model is to encourage and enable outside parties–3rd-party developers and other smartups–to contribute to and expand upon your smartup’s vision. To bring that goal to fruition, a smartup makes anywhere from one to three of the following sublayers available to outside parties. How many sublayers are offered depends on the type of smartup and its overall needs and vision.

The three possible sublayers of the fourth smartup stack layer are:

1. Smartup API Access
2. Smartup Open Source SDK
3. Smartup Standards Group

Smartup API Access

By and large, the vast majority of smartups publish a set of APIs that allow outside parties select access to their datasets. As discussed in the final layer section below, the use of APIs by outside parties can be a major catalyst in a smartup’s growth and success.

Smartup Open Source SDK

The Software Development Kit (SDK) sublayer is more accurately termed an Application Development Kit (ADK) sublayer. The notion behind this sublayer is that there are core codebase modules that may very well be primed for open sourcing. We will see below in the discussion of the final layer of the smartup stack why open sourcing some (or all) of your smartup’s codebase can significantly accelerate the development and evolution of your platform.

Smartup Standards Group

This sublayer is the least-frequently encountered sublayer in the smartup world. The purpose of this sublayer is to standardize key pieces of a smartup’s platform.

Above, in the second layer section, I briefly mentioned PaySwarm. That is a perfect example of a smartup opening up some of its work, exposing their efforts to the open standards process. The newly-announced W3C Web Payments Standards Community Group will focus its efforts around core working technology—mainly PaySwarm.

If your smartup has key technologies that could benefit the greater Social Web by becoming a part of an open standard, then you are encouraged to offer up as much of your technology as possible to make that happen.

The Final Layer: the Smartup Ecosystem

This last layer is perhaps the most difficult one to describe in a few paragraphs. The goal is to freely offer unrelated, 3rd-party smartups and developers tools that they can leverage to help build out, evolve, and expand upon your smartup’s original vision. At the same time, the access that you provide to your smartup’s datasets and technology allows them to create their own paths to success. This is what I term a smartup’s ecosystem.

The sublayer offerings in the fourth layer enable the creation of a motivated, loosely-organized team of volunteer coders that can and will help expand upon and evolve your technology—at least that part of your technology to which you allow 3rd-party access. The power that a corps of ecosystem partners can bring to your smartup’s success cannot be emphasized enough. This is why the ultimate goal of each smartup should be to create more value than is extracted from the ecosystem.

As an example, think of what happened when Automattic–the original makers and copyright holders of WordPress–open sourced the codebase. This led to the eventual, very-large ecosystem of WordPress theme shops, plugin developers, and consultants. It also allowed for Automattic to gain an exceptionally cheap (as in cost) and talented labor force which it continues to use to this day to help it build out the WordPress codebase. That is one of the powers of crowd-sourced software development via open source practices.

Twitter is another great example of the virtues of creating an ecosystem. In its early days, Twitter not only welcomed, but strongly supported and encouraged 3rd-party developers and startups to help expand their ecosystem. They published a rigorous set of APIs that allowed for developers to gain access to many of the datasets Twitter captured. In return, the 3rd-party developers were able to create new features and services that augmented the Twitter experience. This led to a number of successful companies that seemed to pop up over night, swirling around the core of Twitter.

Without these ecosystem partners, Twitter may very well not have succeeded. Unfortunately, as Twitter continues to struggle with figuring out how it can monetize its success, it has cracked down on their ecosystem partners in recent months, making many of them wonder if they can trust Twitter anymore. Twitter’s brilliant ecosystem strategy may be coming to a close.

Facebook was also an early creator of an ecosystem of developers. They offered limited API access, created their Open Graph ontology, and even open sourced a few of their key technologies. However, for the most part, Facebook required (and still does) that the apps of 3rd-party developers live within the siloed confines of the Facebook universe. Facebook is not a proponent of the Open Web, Open Standards, or user-centric control.

Of course, neither Automattic, Twitter, or Facebook are considered smartups. Although they do support–each to differing degrees–some level of open source involvement with their projects, they fail the smartup test with respect to many of the other smartup stack layers detailed above.

Conclusion

You don’t build a startup, you build a company. Whereas the word startup is an enticing concept, it is nothing more than a brand, it connotes nothing more than the early stages of a company. Each stage has its own specific needs and foci. Smartups are no different in this regard.

As mentioned above, many Internet-based startups do not transcend their technology but smartups have a vision beyond their technology. Even so, smartups recognize that–as Internet-obligate entities–they cannot divorce themselves from their technological foundations.

A smartup first builds a strong, foundational layer of technology upon which it then layers on additional functional components. Each of these components–also called sublayers–help push the smartup closer to its vision. To fully actualize its vision a smartup must create the conditions that enable, encourage, and support a system of ecosystem partners. In unison with its ecosystem partners, a smartup works toward providing services that empower users to pursue some of their passions and fulfill some of their goals.

Past Smartup Series Articles

Part 1: Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups

Part 2: Web 3.0 Smartups: the Social Web and the Web of Data

Part 3: Web 3.0 Smartups: Moving Beyond the Relational Database

Part 4: Web 3.0 Smartups: the New Web Business Space

</Smartups Series Part 5 of 5>

How to Get Me Involved in Your Smartup

Interested in getting me involved in your smartup? Please see my 7-by-7 rules.

Below you will find what I call my 7-by-7 rules. Whereas this is my current set of criteria, I believe this list is useable by anyone seeking to attract talent or looking to start a smartup. Please feel free to adopt, modifying, or expand upon this list and use it as you see fit.

I’ve created this post for one purpose. To help alleviate the emails, requests for Skype convos, and PMs that I periodically receive. I’m guessing that I’ve spent 200 hours this year alone rehashing, justifying, even debating to the point of arguing, some of the items below. This post will serve as a one-stop-shop to learn about my requirements. If you read this and still think that we should talk, then contact me.

First an important note. I have my own nascent smartup that requires most of my time. I also have a number of other projects and responsibilities that use up any remaining time. I am active on three W3C standards groups, closely work with a few open source projects, and spend as much spare time as possible with my family.

Thus it will be very difficult to get me to bite on your project. But if you want to maximize your chances of success, here is how.

General Requirements

1. Your startup must be in the Web-based or mobile-based Internet space. In other words, it is a technology-obligate Internet company. Although in the not-too-distant future, my horizons will broaden to include nanotech startups as well.
2. Your startup must be a smartup. I am not interested in stale Web-2.0 startups.
3. Your smartup must be looking to build, or at least contribute to, the Social Web
4. Your smartup and its founders must be proven participants in or at least supporters of open source projects and principles
5. Your smartup must primarily use open source tools and technologies to build its technology platform
6. You understand, believe in, and adhere to the practices and principles of lean startups
7. I will not sign an NDA. In 2009, I signed a few and requested a few others to do the same. In 2010, I requested zero NDAs and only signed one. Now, I will no longer request nor sign NDAs. To learn why, see this good read on the topic.

Specific Requirements

Note: If you are at the earliest stages of your smartup–having yet to incorporate–and are interested in coaxing me to join as a founder, then I will help you address each of the below points assuming that I agree to come on board.

1. The smartup founders must be pre-aligned on exit valuation and have a written exit strategy that all founders have signed. Why? See this great resource.
2. You must understand startup valuation and its impact on future employees and future investors. See this interesting link for one way to assess your smartup’s current value. If you think that your smartup has a current value other than zero, you must be able to justify it. Although your sweat equity and early accomplishments of course add value to your smartup, you are initially being compensated for your contributions by receiving a large chunk of very cheap stock. If you are a pre-profit, pre-revenue, pre-product smartup that has yet to cut a single line of code, please don’t overvalue your contributions at this stage. Outside investors will certainly not make that mistake.
3. With respect to point two above, you have a well-reasoned and modeled capitalization table (cap table). This may not seem crucial right now, but it becomes essential if and when you seek outside investment. Creating, understanding, managing, and periodically updating your cap table early on is key to making better business decisions. Remember, you are starting a business, not a charity.
4. Your smartup must know when to think outside of the box factory and when it must view the box from within. As a founding team, you will meet some very fascinating, talented, and inspiring people as you promote your project. Don’t get too caught up in wanting to hangout with inspiring people all day long. We all want to do that. What matters right now is laying a solid technical foundation for your smartup (see point 1, General Requirements, and point 5, Specific Requirements). Properly allocating scarce resources to accomplish that crucial task at inception is essential to your long-term survivability, investor suitability, and future success.
5. You firmly understand and agree that at the early stages of your smartup, tech is at the core of your company. To that end, your smartup has an internal technical founder. Whereas having a strong business foundation within the core team is fine, even desirable, not having any technical expertise in the core team is detrimental. See this article section for an exhaustive reasoning for this requirement.
6. You have sufficient in-house engineering skills to begin the process of building out your technical platform, of creating and iterating your MVP. You do not plan on using contract coding firms or overseas hacking sweatshops for building your platform. Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. See this article section for a story behind this requirement.
7. With rare exceptions, I have no interest in becoming a basic employee or a non-founder-level executive. By and large, if you want me to be part of your smartup, I’m interested in a founder’s position with a healthy ownership stake. I must have the opportunity for significant reward with the opportunity costs that I will incur. If a founder’s position is not possible, I may consider an advisory or outside board member position for the right smartup.

Over the next few hours it became clear that some people in the Semantic Web and Open Web Standards world had some initial misgivings about the Schema.org initiative. Although what I had tweeted was accurate–I am a big proponent of structured data on the Web and I believe efforts to make it more mainstream are necessary and historically have usually been worthwhile–I obviously had not done my homework and perhaps had replied too hastily.

Since much has already be said and written about why Schema.org is or is not good for the Web I will not be rehashing those debates (although I have linked to a few resources below that are in line with my views). Instead, I want to focus on the higher-level concepts of the Open Web and Open Web Standards.

Open Web and Open Web Standards

First, it is important to see the differences between these two concepts. To help understand the differences, let’s look at an example. The WordPress Blogging platform is an Open Source project. As such it can squarely be placed in the Open Web camp. Its codebase is freely available for anyone to see, utilize, adapt, and expand upon. The project is also open and very supportive of new people who wish to pitch in and help evolve the platform.

However, neither the WordPress project nor its core codebase can be classified as fitting into the Open Web Standards community. Whereas WordPress utilizes a number of Open Web Standards in its products, the project itself does not create standards for the Web.

Who then creates standards? On the Web, standards are not promulgated via for-profit corporations (i.e., Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!). They are also not promulgated by open source projects. Instead they are promulgated through standards bodies, like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Whereas it is true that much of the W3C member base is comprised of people who are representing corporations, there is a big difference between representatives from corporations participating on standards committees and corporations getting together to push their own set of standards.

In my view, this latter point is the big issue with Schema.org. It is an attempt by three large companies, who each have significant influence on the Web, to promulgate their joint vision of how structured data on the Web should be modeled. It is not an effort by a recognized standards body whose focus is clearly to further the Open Web.

How Open is Schema.org?

Just by reading the linked-to announcement by Google in the first paragraph of this article, it is clear that the joint venture has decided to bypass much of the standards work hashed out by various Semantic Web working groups and that they are making a move to control how machine-readable data is structured—at least within their search-engine world. In particular, this paragraph makes a strong statement:

That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas…With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future

Further on down Google’s announcement, you’ll find this point that should raise concern:

One caveat to watch out for: while it’s OK to use the new schema.org markup or continue to use existing microformats or RDFa markup, you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers

How should one interpret this language? To me, it sounds like this is what they are saying:

This is how Google, Bing, and Yahoo! prefer and recommend structured data be represented on the Web. In fact, if you use Schema.org’s structured-data format, your content will get preferential treatment (or at least experience unique benefits) in our search results. However, do not mix markup formats as it will confuse our parsers and hurt your page rankings in our search-engine algorithms. It is best if you simply stick with Schema.org’s markup format.

With the power and influence these three search behemoths exert on the success of Web properties, webmasters, designers, and developers might be foolish to ignore this new initiative. More importantly, if they choose to ignore schema.org, for instance by using some other format with which to represent machine-readable data, it could be to the detriment of their clients and projects.

Note: If you read the official documentation on the Schema.org site and the Terms and Conditions section, it becomes clear why observant developers have additional concerns with the trios power play.

By creating a completely new set of markup types, they are in essence subverting the Open Web as only those people associated with Schema.org (select employees of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!) have access to alter and add new data model types. Thus, although they claim that their goal is to “continue making the open web richer and more useful,” the Schema.org’s schema is not truly open. How does pushing a currently-closed data schema support the Open Web?

The Best Way to Support the Open Web is by Adopting Existing Standards

With the launch of Schema.org, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are thumbing their collective noses at not only the Open Web but also the Open Web Standards community. There have been literally tens of thousands of hours over the past decade volunteered by hundreds of people across the globe to develop a myriad of Open Web Standards—standards that have helped Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! become successful at what they do. With respect to this issue, prodigious efforts and solid progress have been made at developing Open Web Standards for structured data.

If Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! truly wish to make the “open web richer and more useful,” they should adopt, support, promote, and help evolve existing Open Web Standards for the representation of machine-readable data. That would be in keeping with the true spirit of the Open Web.

Outside Resources

The False Choice of Schema.org

TummelVision 67: Tantek Çelik explains open web standards for poets

As I began to compose a response to Nova’s query, it soon became clear that I had too much to say for a blog comment and decided that it was more fitting to write an article for my own site and then simply point Nova to it.

The Rights of the Internet and of its Users

If I were to attend the e-G8 Forum, what is the one big question that I think needs to be answered? Simple. Who owns the Internet?

If I were to attend the e-G8 Forum, what big issues would I push? Simple. I would stress two things: Global Internet democracy and Internet user rights.

What do I mean by global Internet democracy?

I’m not talking about a political movement to ensure that all peoples of the world are granted freedoms that those of use who are fortunate to live in real democracies experience—although that is of course vital to our survival as a species. Instead, I’m talking about the Internet being granted its own rights and freedoms—freedoms to grow, to prosper, to evolve unencumbered by corporate or governmental red tape as if it were its own emerging metaphysical entity.

The Internet has become our global data ecosystem. It is an evolutionary force in the speciation of humanities’ communication and computation infrastructure. As a result of the ease with which data of all types flows around the global, and with the increasing connections made to this data on a daily basis, our species is on the verge of seismic and profound changes.

In just a few decades, the Internet has grown like a developing nervous system, transcending national boundaries, shrinking geographic distances, dissolving geopolitical barriers, and binding many of us together into a single, global network. If allowed to continue its course unshackled by shortsighted power players, then it may become humankind’s most powerful, liberating, unifying, and transformational force.

What do I mean by Internet user rights?

With the recent net neutrality setbacks, discussions of the United States creating its own Internet kill switch, and the Commerce Department’s National ID initiative, informed netizens are right to be concerned about the future of their Internet freedoms.

In a free society, we should strive toward letting individuals, not governments or corporations, be in control of their personal data—an issue made painfully clear by the lack of real data portability among the Web-2.0-styled closed social nightclubs. We should advocate for the Internet rights of user-centric identity control, data ownership, and net equality for our data packets. These should be considered sacrosanct rights for all the Earth’s netizens.

There are a few promising projects in the works that address these issues. For example, the Freedom Box Project is working to create small, cheap, open-sourced personal servers that will return “power to the users over their networks and machines, returning the Internet to its intended peer-to-peer architecture”; the Diaspora Project offers users a distributed version of a Facebook-like social network; and the WebID protocol is creating an open distributed identity standard. These projects, and others in this space, need to be nurtured and given the liberty to proceed without regulation.

Collective and Connective Intelligence versus Myopic Dissonance

In my article, The HyperWeb: it’s All About Connections, I make an important point about the dangerous possibility that the Internet’s full potential might be purposely curtailed as a result of the myopic desires of a few power players:

Just like natural speciation, the continued evolution of the HyperWeb is not guaranteed. As with all evolutionary processes, advancements (innovations) may stop at a certain point.

The Web is a democratizing force that can help redistribute wealth and power. That is antithetical to most large companies interests—and a number of countries as well. Apple, Twitter, Facebook–and of course the phone and cable companies–want as much control as possible. They are fighting for control of the Web, not for the health of the Web.

It’s possible that for political, societal, or economic reasons–or some combination thereof–that the HyperWeb’s evolution may be curtailed. For instance, due to myopic business leaders, scared political leaders, or an uneducated, apathetic citizenry, humanity’s journey on the HyperWeb may not progress past Web 2.0 or Web 3.0.

The emergence of a truly Social Web will require not only policies that guarantee and protect the Internet’s freedom to grow, but also an informed netizenry that fights for its rights and freedoms. To date, neither of these prerequisites have been met.

The key message to communicate to the G8 leaders is that the world is struggling to become a global community and that a healthy, unfettered Internet may be our best insurance policy toward bringing that vision to fruition.

It is crucial that governments and corporations establish programs and invest in infrastructure that enable and ensure distributed services from identity, to micropayments, to unfettered mesh networks. It is critical that governments propose policies and enact laws that ensure user-centric ownership and control of personally-created and contributed data.

Let the people’s voices and data be freely heard and transmitted across the Internet. Let no one nation or corporation put up barriers to the Internet’s evolution no matter what the consequences may be to outdated notions of sovereignty.

Who should own the Internet? No corporation, no government, no organization, no individual. Instead, like the Earth, it should own itself.

My Related Articles

1. How the Death of Net Neutrality Effects You
2. Goodbye Google Old Friend: It’s time for the Open-Source Internet
3. Thinking Outside the Privacy Box
4. Regaining Control of Privacy and Identity: It’s up to Each Individual

YASP…is that somewhat exciting but ultimately frustrating realization that there is yet another social networking, microblogging, curated, real-time, threaded-conversation service that you might have to join so that you don’t get left behind.

In essence, every week we are bombarded with the newest, hottest, social networking startup that is touted as being the next big thing. A number of us rush to sign up, hoping to get in on the closed beta.

Too much Flow, Too Little Signal

Over the course of the past six years or so, I have rushed to grab accounts at many socially-focused websites. A number of them are no longer in existence. I must have over 50 user accounts most of which I have never used after signing up. I created new accounts for two reasons: I wanted to preserve my real name so that no one else could register it as their username; and if a given site became a huge success, I would already be a member.

The fact of the matter is that there are many Web-2.0 startups vying for a piece of the real-time, curated Stream race. And that race is only heating up. Some Stream-based startups are already running, some are about to launch, and many are just at the initial stages of building their vision of the Stream. They all desperately want your attention. They all desperately want for you to put your kayak in their Stream. They all desperately want for you to help them become the next big Internet-startup success.

In fact, in the recent few months, I have created accounts at a number of new social startups including Diaspora, Connect.me, Namesake, and Quora. More on Quora in a bit.

The number of Stream options has grown to an unmanageable level for any one user to participate in a majority of the offerings. The signal is increasing at a decreasing rate while the noise is increasing at a increasing rate. The ratio is moving in the wrong direction.

Social has Many Forms

Not all of the sites on which I’ve registered are technically Stream channels. But they all are social media sites designed to facilitate networking–in some form and fashion–across the Web.

For instance, WordPress.com is not a social network per se. It is a blogging platform and blogging is a social activity. You write a post to share your thoughts with the rest of the world via the Web. Others network with you by commenting on your post, linking to your post, or writing their own post on their blog in response to your post.

I have an account at WordPress.com primarily for the purpose of grabbing my name. As I have my own WordPress.org self-hosted blog (you’re on it right now), I have little reason to use the Automattic-hosted version of WordPress. But I felt the need to preserve my name (in the form of a unique username) so that no one else would take it.

Blogging is a Web 1.5 relic. Whereas it still has a solid foothold in the Web 2.0-space, it has not changed with the times. I make the case for the need for blogging to change in my article, It’s Time for Blogging to Evolve.

I’ve Signed up for Quora. What?

Yes, I know. After all my blog posts and tweets about the open, Social Web, Why did I sign up for yet-another-stream phenomenon? After reading this post you might ask doubly so.

To be honest, I had been thinking about the utility of joining Quora for sometime. This interesting Quora post by Philip Hotchkiss was the final straw in my decision to join Quora, Why do conversations with influencers matter?

I’m going to give Quora a try for three reasons:

1. As an occasional alternative to posting multiple-related tweets in rapid succession. Instead, I can use Quora as an intermediate format between a series of short tweets and a long-form blog post.
2. As a more appropriate place to pose questions that can generate real, meaningful debate. Posing questions on twitter seems to fail, by and large. Asking questions on my blog seems to result in the same failure, unless I first tweet about it and even then it seems that interest in the topic is lost too quickly.
3. To see if I receive more exposure. It will be interesting to see if my thoughts and ideas gain more traction on Quora than they currently do on my blog.

However, just because I have joined YASP does not mean that I have tossed in the towel, that I have given up on helping to bring the distributed Social Web to fruition. It is simply a nod to the times, a practical acknowledgment of the current state of the Web.

Please, Not Another Stream

Whereas I am giving Quora a try, the premise of my year-old query still stands. I believe that people are beginning to get tired with having to create new accounts on the next-greatest-social-networking-site du jour.

I end my Flocking to the Stream article with this thought:

As the number of streams continue to increase and as the flow rate of each stream picks up, people will grow tired of having to subscribe to, having to join yet-another-stream phenomenon (YASP).

So, I ask you here (and I’ve asked this on Quora as well), How many streams can you kayak? How much of your time and attention can you split between multiple (maybe even many) Stream services each day? How much signal are you receiving versus noise? Why should you have to rebuild your social graph each time you join a new siloed social network?

The Web is about distributed communications channels, not about cloistered communications silos. The Web offers netizens the ability to create their own communication channel. I want to subscribe to you, not to you at some social network here and then also to you at another social network there, etcetera.

How many Streams can we efficiently and effectively manage at once? How many channels can we navigate in a meaningful way. How many new social networks do we have to join to keep track of the activities of all our friends, family members, and colleagues?

My Related Articles

• A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging
• The Web is Not (yet) Social

The issue is that the major blogging platforms do not offer the means with which users can connect their sites in a distributed, decentralized, real-time social network. Thus, Twitter and Facebook continue to dominate the social networking space.

The vision of blogging needs to change. Right now it is an old-school vision, where a blog is a little island of content that is for most purposes unintegrated into the real-time social web.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

What needs to change? For starters, I believe that blogging and microblogging should not occur via distinct, separate platforms. I think these concepts need to be combined. I think that a blog needs to be re-envisioned as a multipurpose communications platform.

It would work like this. People could blab in 140-character (or so) snippets all day long if they wanted. But if they had more to say, they could easily do so without having to fracture the Stream by sending interested parties to their blog, to Facebook, or to another site.

In essence, you would summarize your basic idea on your own blog in 140 characters (maybe make it 200) and let each of your followers decide if they cared to see more. If they did, they could click a little icon to reveal your additional content—that is if you decided to post more content.

What would happen when a user wished to leave a comment? This would not be done via blogging business as usual. User contributions would not be via comments left on your blog, they would not be via the old-school capturing of others’ thoughts onto your database.

Instead, a user would “post” a comment on their blog and then their ideas, their rebuttals, their comments would appear in real time on your personal Stream on your blog. The user, however, would still control their content as it was posted via their site and they did not have to physically visit your site to make the comment. They could delete, edit, or augment their content whenever they wanted and any changes would be pushed to your Stream on your blog.

Think of it this way. On your blog, you should be able to broadcast any idea that you would like to engage others in discussing. If your followers wanted to say a few words about your idea, great, if they wanted to provide detailed rebuttals or contributions, they would be able to do that as well. But for each user involved in the conversation, their contribution would be made via their own communications channel, in other words via their own blog.

Why would this be of benefit? The important point is that each user’s Stream stays concisely organized in short tweet-like excerpts and that users do not have to leave their own Stream to continue more detailed conversations somewhere else. Users would not need to travel to Twitter to make pithy comments, then go to Facebook to check up on friends and view their photos, then go back to their own blog to check if anyone had posted a comment.

All Stream activity for each user would be managed in a single place, would be owned and controlled by that user, and would be located on that user’s personal communications channel.

It is Time for the Next Social Communications Evolution

Why should a user have to have a Twitter, Facebook, Quora, LinkedIN, or other social-networking account? Why can’t their blog be their personal communications channel to which others can follow in real time? Why can’t their blog have a real-time Stream dashboard that shows the updates of all those they are currently following? Why can’t their blog be their plug into the Social Web, instead of having to rely on multiple social-networking islands?

A WordPress or Drupal (or pick-your-favorite CMS) platform should offer real networking capabilities. Currently a WordPress network, as an example, is really a site that is controlled by a single entity—often existing on a single server. It is not a disparate connection of WordPress sites linked up across the InterWebs. It is just another closed data silo, not much different than Facebook.

I think the tools are already available to begin to make this vision come to fruition. With technologies like PubSubHubBub, some creative developers could take the popular blogging platforms and turn them into the next generation social network, into truly user-centric, user-controlled, globally linked, real-time distributed communications channels.

Blogging 1.0 Has Reached its Limits

Whereas I believe blogging is still a powerful, relevant technological paradigm in our socially-connected world (I am a consistent and regular user of a blog platform after all), I also believe that the current model of the blog is becoming less relevant as people migrate en mass to newer forms of communication. WordPress, Drupal, and other platforms, continue to do admirable jobs improving the tools and options available to their users. But Blogging 1.0 can only go so far. I’m afraid that it may have reached its limits.

The irony is that to announce this new article (or post) of mine, I will have to leave my blog, I will have to leave my communications channel, the channel that I truly control, and head on over to someone else’s channel and tweet about it. This is why blogging is losing some of its steam. This is why many of my colleagues who used to post frequently to their blogs have not done so in a noticeably long time. The attention has been drawn away from our personal communications channels. The eyeballs are focused elsewhere. The closed-siloed, mega-social nightclubs are winning the battle.

It is time to change that; it is time to once again leverage the power of the Web, regaining control and rebuilding the power of our personal communications channels. It is time for blogging to evolve once more, for the next stage of the blogging revolution to begin.

My Related Articles

1. How Many Streams Can You Kayak At Once?
2. The Web is Not (yet) Social
3. My original detailed article on the need for decentralized microblogging, the benefits, and some of the basic technological underpinnings that would be required, A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging

Update

July 9, 2011: With the recent unveiling of Google+, a few prominent tech bloggers have decided to redirect their blogs to their G+ stream instead. This has created great debate. To learn more about this issue, read my article, Is Surrogate Blogging via Google Plus a Good Idea?

Outside Resources

1. A short, interesting post on using BuddyPress, a WordPress social-networking plugin suite, to build your own open source microblogging platform.
2. More than 2-years ago, Matt Mullenweg introduced the Prologue Theme, a theme used at Automattic to bring Twitter-like, microblogging functionality to WordPress. The theme has been revamped and is now called P2 (also see the theme’s official site). These three links introduce the possibility of using the P2 theme to create a super blog that could meld a regular blog with a microblog, offering a “pretty effective distributed version of Twitter.” To date, no one has done that.

As I looked at his graphic, a different idea came to mind, a different interpretation of the concept in the context of the Web’s evolution. The hierarchical nature of the illustration made me think of the increasing complexity that comes with increasing connectivity. It made me think of how hyperlinks (more precisely hypertext) preceded hyperdata.

I realized that the hyper meme can be extended to the various evolutionary stages of the Web. So, I’m presenting what I call the HyperWeb.

The HyperWeb

The HyperWeb is about increasing connectivity and the increasing complexity of those connections overtime. The chart below outlines a few of the salient features that I believe best describe each stage, or epoch, of the HyperWeb. This is my twist to the traditional data-information-knowledge-wisdom concept.

Complexity is an emergent property of the increasing connectivity, not a direct result of the Web’s technical foundation and framework. But there’s a twist. There is a positive feedback loop that can cause more connections to be made as the system becomes more complex. Connectivity and complexity thus feed on one another, accelerating the rate of change and pushing the Web faster toward its asymptotic future.

The graph below shows the HyperWeb’s epochs plotted against connectivity and complexity. The straight line shows the approximate points where most people assume the various Web epochs will emerge—a nice linear, one-to-one relationship. In reality though, the HyperWeb’s phase transitions live on an asymptotic curve, they are not linear. The asymptotic curve demonstrates that the initial stages of the Web’s evolution are slow but greatly accelerate with increasing connectivity.

I’ve placed the Social Web in the Web 2.5 to Web 4.5 range. If it occurs, that is the zone in which I expect it to materialize, thrive, and then die. What’s that last point? Read on.

Whereas the Web seems far away from Web 5.0, you may be wondering what will the World look like if the Web ever evolves to Web 5.0? You might also wonder what the heck is Web 6.0?

For one possible set of answers to those questions, see my thought piece, Cybernetics, the Social Web, and the Coming Singularity.

The HyperWeb May Not Reach its Full Potential

It’s important to point out that, just like natural speciation, the continued evolution of the HyperWeb is not guaranteed. As with all evolutionary processes, advancements (innovations) may stop at a certain point.

The Web is a democratizing force that can help redistribute wealth and power. That is antithetical to most large companies interests—and a number of countries as well. Apple, Twitter, Facebook–and of course the phone and cable companies–want as much control as possible. They are fighting for control of the Web, not for the health of the Web.

You might think that the Web is already social. It is not. To learn why, see my article, The Web is Not (yet) Social

It’s possible that for political, societal, or economic reasons–or some combination thereof–that the HyperWeb’s evolution may be curtailed. For instance, due to myopic business leaders, scared political leaders, or an uneducated, apathetic citizenry, humanity’s journey on the HyperWeb may not progress past Web 2.0 or Web 3.0.

Each new Web epoch will bring opportunities and uncertainties. The changes will be transformational, reshaping global society. If the Web continues to evolve to higher and higher levels, individuals will increasingly be the main benefactors, not business or politics. As such, the vision and drive to bring each new paradigm shift to fruition will come more and more from the Web’s users and not the Web’s businesses—although revolutionary advances in technology will be required all along the way.

If society wants a truly Social Web, then people need to fight for the Web, to help push it past its 2.0 version, past its current limitations and restrictive user control. The HyperWeb will continue to evolve only if the Web’s netizens make it so.

My Related Articles

1. The Web is Not (yet) Social
2. My five-part series, Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups

Whereas Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and other ventures are social platforms, they are not the Web. These entities are only part of the Web—although it’s looking more and more “like” Facebook wants you to think that the Web equals Facebook.

The Web is currently not social. The social-media-driven Web is the metaspace analogy of meatspace nightclubs.

Each of these internally-focused social networks might have a globally-distributed data center, but all the activity occurs within the walls of their private social clubs. The activity in one social club is predominately isolated from the others. The activity does not freely spread throughout the Web. The conversations do not flow throughout the Web. They flow within each proprietary network with a very limited trickle of “conversation” allowed to the outside Web. Of course, this trickle is allowed out to encourage more people to come in to their closed clubs.

There is a monumental difference between social networking occurring on the Web and the Web being Social. Social creatures frequenting social networks does not make the Web inherently social. Why is this the case?

In my article, A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging, I state:

With their closely-guarded data silos, social networks are not full participants in the Web, they are not participants in the interconnected data ecosystem. So, unlike an ecological web (think of a food web), the Web-based Internet is not as much of an intact web as it is a land of social network islands that punctuate an ocean of truly connected websites.

The Social Web, on the other hand, is a fully functioning and healthy ecosystem were all data are globally connected.

There is no disputing the fact that social is a big part of the current Web. Web 2.0 is the realm of social media, but it is also the web of exclusive, social clubs. Web 2.0 is about companies “doing” social media via cloistered social islands (called “networks”) more than it is about making the Web itself a social space.

The Web is currently not social. It’s the metaspace analogy of meatspace nightclubs. It’s filled with private social silos, which are antithetical to the Web’s vision. Each private social island is an internal network consisting of tightly-controlled infrastructure that offers its own vision of how humans should connect and interact.

Web-2.0-style closed social nightclubs are not the epitome of the Social Web. Their existence is a indication of how much further the Web has to go before it will become a Social space.

Metaville: a Non-social City of Social Stadiums

To better understand some of the points presented above, let’s look at the fictitious city of Metaville. In this analogy, the city of Metaville represents the current state of the not-social Web.

Metaville is a city with millions of residents. From the outside, it might look like a regular, American city. People regularly gather in a number of the city’s stadiums. In those stadiums, they socialize, sharing stories, pictures, minutiae of their daily lives.

The owners of each stadium are furiously growing the size of their stadium to make room for more people to join the conversations occurring inside of their stadium. Membership is often free but the two requirements are that the vast majority of your conversation must remain inside the walled colosseum and that you have little control over what the stadium owners do with your conversations.

There are a few upstart, niche arenas struggling to grab people’s attention, but even these smaller gathering spaces mimic the rules of the big stadiums.

Is the city of Metaville social? Well, there are pockets of social activity spread throughout the city but all of that activity occurs in stadiums with each stadium primarily isolated from the others.

Learn more about the differences between the Social Web Versus Social Networks

It is true that social activity occurs within Metaville. But when people leave one stadium and go to work, to home, or even to a different stadium (some of the residents of Metaville are members of more than one stadium), they leave their friends and conversations behind. Yes, sometimes they will check back in with their friends in a given stadium and sometimes they’ll get a ping from a friend within a stadium, but they don’t take their friends and conversations out of the stadiums. When they join a new stadium, they have to assemble a new set of friends, start a new conversation history.

Conversations do not happen in the streets of Metaville, or at cozy little cafes and diners. Conversations do not happen between a resident currently in his house with another resident currently in her condo. Practically all of the conversations occur within the exclusive domain of the stadiums. Sure, a resident at home can chat with one currently located in a private stadium, but the totality of that conversation is made possible by the propriety infrastructure that each stadium offers its members—and even then the conversation still takes place within the stadium’s system.

So the city of Metaville is actually not social. It is a place that has many stadiums within whose walls friends gather and conversations occur. But when a person leaves the stadium, their friends do not and cannot follow them. When a member leaves a stadium, a security guard inspects their belongings to make sure that very little is removed from the stadium.

In the realworld, in our meatspace, this is not the way life works. Our friends can come with us and even join us outside of the stadiums. Our friends can come over to our house, or we can chat with them in cafes, or on the streets, or in parks. We are not prevented from being social where ever we go.

Metaville is the model of the current Web. It has some very large pockets of social activity but the conversations and friendships do not readily travel outside of the stadiums.

This metaphor could be expanded further. Instead of Metaville being populated with a bunch of closed stadiums, it could be Metastate populated with closed cities whose citizens rarely leave to visit other cities, or Metacountry whose closed states have tight boarder-crossing restrictions, or Metaworld with closed countries tightly controlling and limiting the flow of information from its citizens into neighboring countries.

When you look at life in Metaville, you will see that the current Web is no more social than one stadium full of people, that the cafes and diners of the Web are ghost towns, that the stadiums of Metaville are more like dictatorial countries.

But All is Not Dark in the Streets of Metaville

There are a few glimmers of light shinning through the streets of Metaville, a few efforts that are counter to the Web-2.0-styled stadium construction. These efforts are focused on helping to create a truly Social Web, at allowing conversation to happen in the cafes and diners of Metaville, and allowing users to take their conversations and friends with them no matter to what unchartered locations of the city they may wish to travel.

Companies like Status.net, the startup Diaspora, and the research project SMOB all are diligently working at bringing federated services to the Web. There are also some of us that are working on innovating new, foundational technologies that will allow for distributed social interactions across the Web and offer truly user-centric identity control. For instance, instead of the limitations and non-user-centric aspect of OpenID, there is a group of us working at offering a truly user-centric identity protocol called WebID.

The Not-so Fine Line

You might think there’s a fine line between calling the Web a space filled with private social clubs and a Social space itself. You might think that it is not a big deal to call the current Web social. But for Social Web Architects, such as myself, the differences and distinctions are large, not small.

Social Web Architects are fighting for the rights of individuals to own and control their data, to have powerful yet easy to use identity and privacy tools, to freely and easily carry on conversations throughout the Web—not just within the walled sanctums of a few snooty nightclubs. We are building technologies that will link data and allow for the serendipitous discovery of new connections with other datasets and with fellow human beings—no matter where on the Web those connections and people may lay.

The Social Web is the metaspace actualization of a user-centric controlled, globally-connected conversation space across the Web. In essence, the mission of Social Web Architects is to bring the Web’s vision to fruition.

For a vision of the Web’s evolutionary epochs, and humanity’s race toward a Social Web, see my HyperWeb article.

Fortunately, the Web is constantly evolving. What it is experiencing now are the natural growing pains of an adolescent platform. Many of the current social-media nightclubs will eventually give way to a more open, user-centric ecosystem. I believe that they will have little choice as humanity inexorably races toward a truly Social Web.

Outside Resources

For two additional (one differing) perspectives on this issue, see Dave Winer’s, What I mean by “the open web” and and Stowe Boyd’s, Messiness At Scale.

My Related Articles About the Social Web

1. It’s Time for Blogging to Evolve
2. Flowing Your Identity Through the Social Web
3. My five-part series, Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups
4. Apple’s Ping Versus the Social Web
5. How the Death of Net Neutrality Effects You
6. Goodbye Google Old Friend: It’s time for the Open-Source Internet
7. Thinking Outside the Privacy Box
8. Regaining Control of Privacy and Identity: It’s up to Each Individual

But there are two issues that I wish to address. First, only one of the six listed most influential topics on my Klout profile make sense. Second, without connecting my Facebook account, I’m significantly penalized.

These two issues have big ramifications for those of use trying to build the Social Web.

Luke, Use the Foci

About three or four months ago, I tweeted the same observation concerning the most influential topics list on my Klout profile. Someone from Klout promptly @replied to my tweet stating that with continued use, the algorithms would more accurately determine my most influential topics. But this list has remained unchanged.

I have not bothered to check this assertion, but I believe that sixty percent of my time tweeting and ninety percent of my time writing is spent on the topic of a user-centric, distributed Social Web. This is divided between generic categories of Internet freedoms (GPL, open source in general, net neutrality, data portability, privacy, identity, BuddyPress) and Web 3.0 (Semantic Web/Linked Data, smartups, WebID, FOAF, RDFa).

Yet my Klout profile does not reflect any of that. In fact, “Indiana” is one of my listed most influential topics when I would guess that fewer than 1% of my tweets have used that word.

Of course, I could be wrong. Klout can scour my backtweets a lot more efficiently and effectively than I can. It may be that fewer of my tweets are about those topics than I realize, that few people retweet any of my tweets that are about my primary foci. Perhaps I engage in conversational chatter on Twitter more often than I think.

Whatever the actual truth held within my Twitter data, I’d be very surprised if “Indiana, SEO, Design, Influence, Google” are my most popular topics. I rarely use any of those words in my Tweets or hashtags.

I do not spend my time within the dungeons of Mordor, I mean Facebook.

But it could quite possibly be that Klout is accurate, that those are my most influential topics. If so, that means that the vast majority of my time has been wasted, that I shouldn’t bother tweeting about #privacy, #identity, #opensource, #Web30, #BuddyPress, #SemanticWeb, #WebID…etcetera.

I’m of course being somewhat facetious. The reality is that I already know for which issues most people retweet and @mention me—and it is not the topics that Klout claims I’m most influential on. However, when the vast majority of my tweeting and blogging foci aren’t reflected in the self-proclaimed “Standard for Influence”, I have to wonder whether Klout’s algorithms need some tweaking, or whether I’ve got a clot in my Klout.

Interestingly, and on a side note, influence is one of my most influential topics! In my mind that evokes the image of a self-referential, infinite-looping, circular-referencing maelstrom.

An Audience with Sauron

Without connecting my Facebook profile to my Klout profile, I’m penalized forty percent—whatever that means, I don’t like the sound of it.

Although I do have a Facebook account, I do not use Facebook. I think I have four or so people whose friendship I’ve accepted and who are obviously waiting with baited breath to see what I’m going to say. To date, I have not made a single wall post. So, they will be waiting for a lot longer as I plan to never post any content in Facebook.

In fact, I think in 2010, I may have bothered to login to Facebook three times and that was only to checkout one or two aspects of its interface.

Why don’t I use Facebook? If you’ve been following my tweets and reading my articles posted to my site, you will already understand why. Facebook is antithetical to most of what I believe the Social Web is about. I’m professionally working on helping to bring the concept and infrastructure of the Social Web to fruition. Thus, I do not spend my time within the dungeons of Mordor, I mean Facebook.

Since I don’t use Facebook, some of you may ask why I use Twitter then, as it too is just another private data island. Simple. Although Twitter is a participant in the closed-silo wars, my posted content is accessible to anyone who wants to see it. In other words, they do not have to be logged in to access my Stream. With Facebook, you must not only have an account but also be logged in and be a friend of that person to see their Stream.

As I’m trying to promote the concepts of an open, distributed, user-centric Social Web, Twitter lets me get the message out to everyone—whether they follow me or not, whether they’re logged in or not, whether they have a Twitter account or not.

An Island of Misfit Toys

If Klout is to become the true measure, source, authority, standard for influence across the online world, then it needs to stop living exclusively within the social-networking private clubs. Why? Because influence occurs across the Web-based and mobile-based Internet. It isn’t restricted to closed social-media silos.

What about all of my online activity that occurs within my various blogs? Many people comment on my articles. What about the activity that occurs on forums, like the BuddyPress support forum where I’m a moderator (albeit a very inactive one lately)? What about on identica, or Diaspora, or the various niche BuddyPress sites that are beginning to pop up?

Conversations and influence flow beyond closed private data islands. Much activity occurs across the decentralized Web. In fact, for those of us fighting for the Social Web, we envision a day when most of the social activity will occur across a user-centric, decentralized, distributed architecture. The exclusive walled gardens of the Web will become a relic of the bygone, archaic Web-2.0 days.

Right now, a Klout score may best be summarized as a subjective measure of influence within a few select groups of data clubs. If a Klout score is to become the “standard measure of online influence” as proclaimed on their Twitter profile, then a user’s influence across the entire Social Web must be objectively calculated.

Shouldn’t my activity across the entire Internet be factored into my influence? Shouldn’t the activity of all of those who spend their time outside the Islands of Misfit Toys count for something? Of course.

Does this really matter? Yes.

As companies are beginning to use Klout scores to assess a potential candidate’s job application, to determine if a particular person has sufficient influence to be awarded a consulting contract, and for other inevitably unknown purposes, the accuracy and integrity of that score becomes paramount to all the Web’s citizens. Presently, too much importance is being placed on a Klout store, most likely to the unfair detriment of some.

As some company is going to win the influence-measurement war, if you care about your clout and how it is determined on Klout, provide them with feedback and the ways in which you think they could improve their service.

Update

December 22, 2010: Less than 12 hours after posting this article, my Klout Most Influential Topics list has changed since the first time I can remember. It’s still very inaccurate, but notice that the topic “Google” has been replaced with “Open Source”. A coincidence? I sure hope so. Otherwise I’m going to have to keep writing articles to get this all straightened out.

December 22, 2010 (Update 2): Joe Fernandez, the Cofounder and CEO of Klout, contacted me via Twitter this afternoon asking if I’d like to talk. We chatted for awhile about the issues I brought up in this article and some of the directions in which Klout will be heading in the near future. After talking with Joe–a very nice guy by the way–it is clear to me that they are thinking about the larger ramifications of their service and what it truly means to be the standard measure of online influence. Their task is very challenging indeed. It’s nice to know that Joe cares enough about their users to take the time to listen to feedback and communicate their dedication to continually evolving and improving their platform.

Related Outside Articles

The Read Write Web article that has brought some visitors to the post and triggered a small discussion, 4 Ways Klout Can Evolve.

An interesting though piece by Justin Goldsborough, Why Klout scares me; Hint: It’s not the tool itself

Data portability is defined as the ability to “bring your identity, friends, conversations, files and histories with you, without having to manually add them to each new service.”

Does this really solve the most important issue that users face when spelunking the depths of the social networking space?

This is the fundamental defect with the notion of data portability on the closed Web. The duplication of a user’s data across multiple networks.

While it’s great that a user has the flexibility, the freedom, even the right to take their data with them, in effect they are not taking anything with them. Users are not actually porting anything from one site to another. Porting implies the moving of an entity from one location to another, the transferring of data from one machine to another.

In reality, data portability is about giving users the freedom and ability to grab a copy of their current dataset and paste it into yet another data silo. They are not actually moving their data as much as copying it from one silo to another. So, their data is now duplicated across multiple locations.

The data silo (the social network) from which the data was copied (“moved”), does not delete the content—often even after a user requests the deletion of their account. Why? Because a member’s data, the content, is one of the most important business assets the social network owns. It is their key competitive advantage.

This is the fundamental defect with the notion of data portability on the closed Web. The duplication of a user’s data across multiple networks makes it even harder for a given user to control their identity, privacy, and Web presence.

What most people call a Web identity is simply an identifier. The true representation of an individual on the Web is what I describe as the set of all their identity graphs.

I don’t want my personal data exported, copied, replicated throughout the Web. I am for data redundancy where it’s efficient and necessary, but exporting a copy of my dataset (or subset) from one social graph to another does not make sense. You are duplicating your effort. You are splitting up–or more accurately duplicating part of–your identity graph into little pieces and then strewing them into different locations, placing them in multiple, closed data silos.

Don’t get me wrong. I am for true data portability. I’m just not in favor of the way it is currently implemented by the few participating social networks.

What I am proposing is a step beyond data portability that is even more user centric, that could make the Internet a truly open space, that would help usher in the Social Web.

What is Identity on the Web?

Before introducing my concept, it’s important to understand a key difference between my views of Web identity and the mainstream definition.

The commonly-accepted definition of a Web identity is a digital representation of a user. It is one of many possible personae that an individual may have on the same social network or among all the networks in which a given person participates. But I believe this definition discounts the individual in the equation.

In my article, Thinking Outside the Privacy Box, I discuss my philosophical views about identity on the Web. In short, what most people call a Web identity is simply an identifier. The true representation of an individual on the Web is what I describe as the set of all their identity graphs.

Enter Identity Flowability

In our service-centric Web-2.0 world of social networks where each new service is in effect a closed data silo, data portability is an important issue. What I’m suggesting is that the next focus of the Social Web should be to obviate the need for data portability.

Instead of data portability, the Social Web needs to champion the concept of Identity Flowability. Identity Flowablility is the easy movement of and control over a given identity graph by a given user.

Identity Flowablility enables a user to store any part of their identity graph in the places that they choose and then allow other sites to reference that data from those places—not copy the data from those places. Data would be semantically marked up to facilitate their auto discoverability for sharing between other sites. Access rights could easily be assigned.

WebIDs could become the cornerstone in the user-centric Social Web.

Thus the concept of Identity Flowablility is to provide each user with an easier, more efficient, and effective mechanism with which to control their entire IdentitySpace. It creates a user-centric container through which data content and privacy rights could be better managed and controlled.

How would this concept change the Social Web? Instead of the quantity of users a site has being its most valuable, monetizable asset, the true value proposition of each Web 3.0-enabled company would be the quality and uniqueness of their service. No longer would a large membership base necessarily equal a big asset as smaller, more nimble niche-market players could compete by offering superior services.

WebID: Helping to Flow and Control Identity

There is a very promising identification protocol that goes a long way toward creating the foundation of a flowable identity. It’s called WebID—in particular, a FOAF+SSL WebID. If you are interested in identity flowability, I encouraged you to learn more about WebIDs and how they could become the cornerstone in the user-centric Social Web.

My Related Articles

1. The Web is Not (yet) Social
2. Thinking Outside the Privacy Box
3. Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups
4. Repackaging the Promise of the Social Semantic Web
5. Regaining Control of Privacy and Identity: It’s up to Each Individual
6. A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging

Also See

An interesting six-minute video presentation graphically discussing the issues with OpenID: OpenID: Identity Service or Identity Platform

For an interesting, possible alternative to today’s closed-siloed Web, visit the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data. Their task is challenging but in tune with my sentiment expressed above.

To celebrate this occasion, I am offering two specials: 40% off of the standard BuddyPress Privacy Component Support Plan (BPCSP) and the other 25% discount on advertising rates. All but two of the first month’s ad spots are sold. So, if you want to get in early and lock in these prerelease rates, act now.

This is the fourth article in my five-part series about Powering Startups to Become Smartups. In part 1, we discussed why Web-2.0 startups were stuck in the box and how in-the-box thinking leads to missed opportunities. In part 2, we discussed the most salient aspect of Web 3.0, the Web of Data and the emergence of the Social Web.

Part 3 was a rather in-depth discussion of the challenges and pitfalls of relying solely on a 40-year old database model, the RDBMS, to power a Web-3.0 smartup. We looked at the NOSQL class of database models and discussed how they might provide a better fit to a smartup’s increasingly-complex dataset in the realm of the Social Web.Don’t confuse idealism with realism. Most startups do not have a vision that can scale to a Twitter or Facebook-sized company.

In this next article, we’re going to look at how the first three facets of Web 3.0 create business opportunities and challenges. In particular, we’ll discuss the new startup funding paradigms that smartups can leverage to evolve, grow, and succeed in business.

Hanging Up a Shingle is Easier Than Ever

In Web 2.0, the barriers to entry for a Web startup began to decrease. The quality and number of Open Source tools with which to code, design, market, and serve up a website ballooned. Many of the tools were free (as in cost) or cheap to use. However, even with these great tools, there were still a number of barriers that prevented a potential startup from quickly and easily hanging out its shingle.

The cost of hardware, hard-drive space, bandwidth, and hosting were a few key hurdles. The other two big hurdles were finding skilled programmers (who expected to receive high compensation for their work) and the availability of easy-to-use Web programming frameworks with which to prototype quickly a new site.

These barriers meant that a startup often had to raise a few million dollars to adequately capitalize itself, to give it a fighting chance at building up enough traction to get noticed by users, additional investors, and potential acquirers. But the Web-2.0 business space continued to evolve, innovating new, more efficient ways of doing business.

The wisdom of agile development via frequent iteration and the rise of the lean startup movement–with its minimally viable product mantra, customer development practices, and smart pivoting–transformed the way most Web startups conducted their affairs.

Now, as we enter the final stages of Web 2.0, the barriers to entry are quickly crumbling. In most cases, smartups can startup with a lot less money and the tools, funding options, and potential talent pool are better (and cheaper) than ever.

For instance, it is easy to obtain high-quality, cheap computers, and quickly compile from source (or install from binaries) powerful Open-Source Web development frameworks. There is also an army of young, talented software engineers each chomping at the bit to play the startup game and do so for little up-front. It is relatively easy to secure funding, especially as the amount required to get going is a fraction of what it used to be. The biggest challenge that startups face now might be hiring—how to identify and attract sufficient talent from the hot-shot coder pool, talent that has the proper skills, fit, and alignment for your company.

Whereas securing great talent might be one of the most difficult tasks facing startups today, I believe that the most revolutionary change in the Web business environment is how Web-3.0 smartups will be initially funded.

Smartups Know Their Niche

If you are starting a business then there must be a reason. All businesses are founded with the same fundamental goals: to generate revenue so that they can grow, make profits, and financially benefit their owners. As we are not talking about not-for-profits (which still require revenue generation to fuel growth), it is assumed that this basic truth is known by your startup.

Vision, goals, and strategies are all key parts of a startup’s foundation. But the most crucial aspect of any startup should be its ultimate goal—its exit strategy. This is the financial payout or payback for the risk taken and hard work invested into the startup.

Your vision might be for your smartup to change the world in a bold and positive way. Your goals and strategies are focused toward achieving that vision. But the ultimate business goal as an owner is to profit from your risk and hard work. Profiting not only enables you and your family to survive, but also can fuel your future visions to positively impact the Earth.

At the earliest stages of your startup, you should come to an understanding, an agreement on your exit strategy. To do that, you must decide if your startup realistically has the potential of growing to a Twitter or even Facebook-sized company, or if you think it is more of a small or medium-niche player, an acquisition candidate. This one issue can radically dictate your operational strategies and it can determine your probable funding path.

In determining your niche, don’t confuse idealism with realism. Most startups do not have a vision that can scale to a Twitter or Facebook-sized company. Although many startups think that they have the next killer Web service, the one that will give Google, or Twitter, or Facebook a run for its money, the reality is that many of these startups lack a game-changing vision. Instead, they are small to medium-sized niche players who will either be perceived by the Web’s behemoths as bugs to squash or, if they play their cards right, considered as potential acquisition candidates.Web 1.0 was the reign of the VC; Web 2.0 saw the rise of the Angels; Web 3.0 will be the domain of MicroAngels

Smartups are honest and clear about their niche and potential market size. If they truly have a game-changing vision backed by extraordinary technology, then they proceed down that path. If they have a great idea that adds value to the Web but does not have the potential to become the next Google, then they proceed down a different path.

There is nothing wrong with being a small to medium-niche smartup. Recognizing that fact upfront can give you a competitive advantage over your colleagues at other startups who are clueless about their market potential (and are therefore not smartups).

But being realistic, instead of idealistic, does not mean that you undervalue your vision. You need to remain flexible and periodically reassess your exit strategy. Small niches sometimes grow into larger niches over time—when Google and Facebook started up, the current market niche for them at the time was rather small as well.

Whether you’re a first-time entrepreneur or a serial entrepreneur with a record of success, you need to have passion for and belief in your smartup’s vision. If the results of your honest assessment about your smartup’s current market potential do not turn out the way you had hoped, don’t reactively hedge your risk because of disappointment or fear. You need to remain tenacious, positive, and take measured risks.

Web 2.0 = lean startups; Web 3.0 = keen smartups

Although Web 3.0 is fermenting evolutionary changes in the Web business model, economic reality is hard to overcome. Those Web-1.0 and Web-2.0 businesses with the biggest coffers still wield a mighty sword of influence. If you don’t realistically believe that your Web-3.0 smartup is destined to become its own behemoth, then you must learn how to play with the Web-1.0 and Web-2.0 relicts.

Keep Your Eye on The Exit

Why should smartups make figuring out their exit strategy a top, early priority? Since most smartups are not in contention to become the next Facebook or Google, the most realistic exit option they have is to be acquired.

Yes, scaling up for an IPO was all the rage during the disastrous-dotCom bubble, but today that is a difficult task. Instead of shooting for targets that are too far away, it is best to focus energies on targets that are much closer.

It is not atypical for a VC-backed startup to require 5 or so years before it either is acquired, has an IPO, or closes shop. The greatest majority of them do the latter. Big companies are actively swooping up startups to fuel their innovation and augment their talent pool. Many of the acquired startups are pre-revenue, being purchased for less than a $20 million valuation. It is significantly easier to shoot for this type of early exit rather than shooting at an IPO target that usually requires five or more years to pull off, if at all.

If a smartup plays its cards right, it can startup, build traction, and attract the interest of a potential acquirer in a two to three year timeframe. A successful, early exit will allow each happy entrepreneur to launch their next venture and try for even greater rewards.

Keen Compliments Lean

The lean startup movement incubated and spread its wings in Web 2.0. But in Web 3.0, it will be the keen smartup that succeeds. A keen smartup is a lean startup that wisely embraces the Social Web and the Web 3.0 paradigm. Being keen requires you to be well versed in all aspects of your business. It requires you to remain agile not only with platform development, but also with funding.

Smartups need to apply the same agile, lean thinking across their entire business operations —not just their platform development approach. This can be a real problem as many startups are formed by a team of software engineers, the majority of whom have little if any prior business operations experience.

The initial funding amount that most startups now require is often way below the level at which a traditional VC considers investing. But VCs do not like to be left behind. Paraphrasing Aristotle, VC’s abhor a vacuum. As VCs saw that the trend of decreasing investment requirements was becoming a general reality, some innovated their financial models creating a funding category called super angel, seed-stage VC, or MicroVC.

Remember, smartups not only know their niche but also have determined their ultimate goal for forming, their exit strategy—what they consider to be a desirable, achievable, and adequately-profitable sale of their business.

But investors often look at and treat startup teams as if they were a flock of lost sheep: sheep who love grass and are experts at eating it, but have no idea how to get home. That is the challenge that every business faces. How do you get home? How do you win the game? How do you succeed at bringing your ultimate goal to fruition?

This can be an issue as a smartup’s exit strategy may not be in alignment with an outside investor’s exit strategy. What one considers a fantastic acquisition offer, the other might scoff at as unacceptable.

Funding Revolution: VCs to Angels to MicroAngels

During these late stages of Web 2.0, we’re beginning to see important shifts in the way startups are funded. Startups can bootstrap in innovative ways by the joint leveraging of tools like Kickstarter and social networks to quickly generate operating funds. The meteoric funding success of the Diaspora Project is a great example.

Is Disapora’s funding success a fad? I believe not. I think it presages a fundamental revolution in startup funding—what I call the rise of the MicroAngels.

MicroAngels are investors (professional or part time) who provide small amounts of capital usually less than $10,000.

Although it appears to me that Diaspora is not a startup, but an Open-Source project, their novel funding approach is a harbinger of the changing funding climate in Web 3.0. These changes will accelerate, bringing more opportunities and challenges for both entrepreneurs and investors alike.

Before accepting angel funding, make sure that your team has a pre-agreed upon exit strategy and that any potential angel investor agrees to the exit strategy as well (in writing).MicroAngels will start to play an increasingly important and prominent place in the earliest stages of a smartup. However, this does not mean that typical, larger angel funding will not be necessary at a future stage in a smartup’s lifecycle. It takes a lot of runway to fuel a startup, to help it gain sufficient traction so that it becomes a tasty and attractive morsel to potential acquirers. As we discussed above, a smartup knows its niche and has a well-defined exit strategy.

Most Web-3.0 smartups require a lot less money to get going. They need fewer funding dollars than they would have three or more years ago. Whereas a few million (two to five) might have been the norm in the past, now a smartup might be able to open shop with $50k to $250k (or even less). This is a relatively easy amount to acquire.

A Thousand Angels in a Land of Giants

It is my opinion that for the majority of today’s Web-3.0 smartups, VC (Venture Capital or Venture Capitalist) funding will be a last, not first, resort. In fact, a startup that accepts VC funding as its first resort, instantly boxes itself in, greatly reducing its flexibility.

In general, the offered financing terms of VC funding are often too restrictive. Smartups that accept VC funding could very well turn their once-agile smartup into an inflexible small business. Why is this the case?

In Smartups Know Their Niche, we discussed the essential requirement that smartups need to honestly assess their market potential and size. Whereas VC funding is likely a poor fit for the vast majority of Web-3.0 smartups (at least in their initial stages), it might be absolutely necessary for those few smartups that truly have a solid, game-changing vision. Whether you initially seek VC funding or even consider VC funding at all greatly depends on your smartups vision and true potential.

It is not atypical for VCs to expect a minimum 10 to 20 fold return on their investment. A VC literally has the power to decide whether an acquisition offer is accepted, whether you as a founder and entrepreneur get to cash out and be rewarded for your vision and hard work—often referred to as letting the founders earn.

This can mean that acquisition offers that might seem attractive to founders, angel investors, and share-holding employees are not sweet enough for the VCs. The VCs will literally disallow any sale until either an offer is received that meets their minimum ROI or the startup folds.

This effectively obviates any early exit strategy that founders may have and more times than not results in the startup fizzling out after five or so years if there is not a successful M&A bid or IPO. Whereas insufficient operating capital (runway) will lead to failure, in the above scenario, failure is the result of ridged VC expectations and not due to insufficient runway.

A Caveat
The reality for smartups is that attracting first round funding from angels (or via other means) does not guarantee that you’re heading toward a healthy early exit. It is very likely that after your first round of capital, you’ll require a second round. This might be from a mid-level angel or it could be from a MicroVC. You should be aware that it’s realistic for your anchor investors to seek subsequent rounds of financing, not solely for the additional funds (i.e., for increasing runway) but often so they can turn over the daily investment oversight as the smartup begins to scale. For that single reason, it is always wise to stay friendly and connected to VCs, even if you think you’ll never need them.

If funding decisions are not made wisely and at the proper stage in a smartup’s lifecycle, the result could be to powerdown your smartup returning it to the lowly startup classification, throwing it back into the Web-1.0 and Web-2.0 funding shackles.

Is the current spate of early exits just a Web acquisition bubble? How long will the current early-exit renaissance last? That is difficult to predict. Since it is more than likely that at some future point the current wave of early-exit opportunities will hit a roadblock, it is wise to keep your options open and your connections with the greater funding community (MicroAngels, Angels, MicroVCs, and VCs) healthy.

Conclusion

The Web is at a tipping point, not a proverbial tipping point, but an actual point in time where accelerating changes brought on by increasing social connectivity, data complexity, and user frustrations are literally transforming the startup and business landscape. There are big challenges and opportunities to those startups that embrace the Web-3.0 paradigm.

The biggest challenge and opportunity may be the emergence of the Social Web. The Social Web is about users. It’s about innovating new ways to provide increasing connectivity to the masses on one end while on the other providing individual users with open access to and control over their data, wherever those data are stored.

Users are getting fed up with the difficulties of navigating between social networking islands. A typical Web user today has a multitude of accounts, each with its own username and password, each associated with a specific Web service, and each as a separate, independent repository of a subset of their overall content, of their overall IdentitySpace.

Whereas their are few single-sign on solutions, most do not address the larger issue of data portability, data redundancy, and user control. As we’ve discussed throughout this series, one paradigm-busting change that Web 3.0 may bring is the liberation of users’ data from the data prisons and the yielding of its control back into the hands of individual users.

Web 3.0 will break down Web 2.0’s proverbial walled garden of disparate user data. The omnipresent closed data silos will be relegated to a distant memory.

Web 3.0 is about small changes and tiny connections making big differences. But it’s also about big, disruptive ideas in user data freedom and revolutionary funding models altering the Web’s business environment.

It’s no longer sufficient to simply startup. Web-2.0 startups are trapped in a box, oblivious to much of the changing Webscape. In order to survive and thrive in Web 3.0, you must breakout of the box, step outside the box factory.

Smartups will prosper in the coming revolution by embracing the Web of Data and the Social Web, by carefully modeling their dataspace so as it can scale more quickly and efficiently, and by being keen about their funding options and ever aware of their exit strategy.

Web 3.0 is the realm of the Smartup!

Angels and VCs to Follow on Twitter

Here are a few Angels and VCs that I follow who actively tweet. There are others, but I feel that I get a sufficient overview of startup-investment news and ideas from these guys. Also, and this is very key to me, most of these guys provide useful information and usually do not pollute my Stream with stuff that does not apply to the topic at hand, does not stray too far off the reasons for which I follow.

Steve Blank

John Greathouse

Eric Ries

Mark Suster

Venture Hacks

Fred Wilson

AngelList, from the Venture Hack guys

Here are a few others to consider (I do not currently follow but will occasionally check their public Stream):

Jeff Clavier

Sean Ellis

Dave McClure

Keith Rabois

Y Combinator

Additional Resources

Paul Graham has an interesting take on The Future of Startup Funding

An interesting article on crowdfunding via Kickstarter.

Mark Suster has an interesting, five-part series on angel investing

An interesting book on the topic of exit strategies, Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors

Basil Peters, the author of Early Exits, has a very informative, four-part video presentation: How Not to Sell a Business – Don’t Blow The Biggest Deal of Your Life

Basil also has additional, useful information on his AngelBlog website

Tech ‘seed’ investors kick valuations into long grass

Is Convertible Debt Preferable to Equity?

Rise of the Angels by Naval Ravikant (co-founder of Venture Hacks)

A disturbing article claiming that some of the top MicroVCs (SuperAngels) may be in collusion. There is much debate to the validity of the claims made within this article. My point in including a link to this potentially-specious article is that Smartups need to be very careful in the way they approach funding. The professional startup-funding world is a game in which most players are trying to get the best deal for themselves at the expense of all others. Smartups are best served by partnering with funders that are truly trying to help them succeed and not just viewing them as another chip on the table. Here’s a follow up article on what is now being called AngelGate as well as Mark Suster’s perspective— a VC I recommended above to follow on Twitter.

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</Smartups Series Part 4 of 5>

Continue on to Part 5 — Building the Social Web: the Layers of the Smartup Stack

Other Smartup Series Installments

Part 1 — Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups

Part 2 — Web 3.0 Smartups: the Social Web and the Web of Data

Part 3 — Web 3.0 Smartups: Moving Beyond the Relational Database

Part 5 — Building the Social Web: the Layers of the Smartup Stack

Today’s Web-based services are dealing with substantially higher volumes of data. But the challenges of data storage and management in the Social Web go beyond the issue of increasing data volume. In Web 3.0, data are significantly more complex and difficult to define ahead of time.

Unfortunately, many existing Web-2.0 startups continue to use only a RDBMS (relational database management system) model for meeting all their data storage and management needs—and some of these startups are starting to see the problems with that decision.

As I state in Part 2 of the Smartup Series:

The Social Web is an emergent property of the Web of Data. It is a logical outcome of the Web’s increasing social connectivity and the semantification of data to make it machine understandable, discoverable, and open.

Square Pegs and Round Holes

What does this mean to Web-3.0 smartups? Highly structured and predefined data models (such as those mandated by an RDBMS) are having a harder time at effectively handling the rich, complex, dynamic datasets that are becoming increasingly common in Social Web-based services.

Smartups are beginning to discover that it is easier to map social-data objects onto NOSQL databases than the traditional RDBMS models. Does this mean that the days are numbered for the RDBMS? No. As we will discuss shortly, a RDBMS may still play an important role in a smartup’s data model toolbox.

Note: Throughout this article, I’ll use the acronym NOSQL versus the NoSQL variant which is sometimes aligned with the “No to SQL” movement as in SQL sucks. NOSQL is now generally considered to mean “Not only SQL,” which in my opinion is the proper message. Some people refer to the non-SQL-alternative DBMSs as post-relational, but that is a misnomer as well as some of these models were in use before the relational model and SQL were even invented. You may occasional also see them referred to as non-relational.

Looking Beyond the RDBMS Box

In an attempt to future proof their application stack, making it as scalable as possible, many Web-2.0 startups continue to use a RDBMS (often MySQL) with a sharded instead of normalized data schema. They myopically choose the same database model and schema as the vast majority of startups that came before them. These startups are not thinking outside of the box. Instead they are following the herd deeper into the ever-expanding box.

Why do they do this? One reason is the false belief that they are on the cutting edge of the proverbial web-scale architecture debate. However, a RDBMS engine–whether sharded or normalized–is not the best storage solution for every data-asset type of a Social Web service.

RDBMS’s ability to scale to size quickly decreases as the complexity of the dataset increases.

Web-2.0 startups that insist on using RDBMSs as their only data warehousing model will see their database engine performance decline as their datasets grow—in size and complexity. They will also see their competitors–those Web-3.0 savvy companies practicing the art of keen smartup–have more success in managing their backends.

When it comes to building scalable services that sit on top of the Web, a one-size-fits-all data partitioning scheme is no longer desirable. In fact, it may be impractical. The days when a RDBMS could be the do all and end all of most Web-based companies back-end data system are over.

The Limits of the RDBMS for the Social Web

Think about the nature of RDBMS use in the enterprise space versus the Web-based social networking space. RDBMSs were designed for the needs of the enterprise, not the Web. Having to serve a few thousand or even hundred thousand employees at a large company is not the same thing as having to serve several million, or more, users on a highly-trafficked social network.

The Web-based Internet is a different arena than the LAN and WAN-based enterprise space. RDBMSs are fantastic for transactional-based data where data persistence (durability) is mandated—such as storage of data for financial applications, product records for large manufacturers, and a number of other enterprise-specific cases.

RDBMSs have worked well with very structured, tabular data. But the Web of Data is moving toward more complex, highly-connected datasets that are more difficult to pigeonhole into predefined table definitions. As we will see later, when the Social Web’s data complexity and connectivity are taken into account, the issues with exclusively relying on a RDBMS become clear.

It’s important to note that a RDBMS may still play a pivotal role, especially if a smartup requires the storage of persistent, transactional data—such as an online store. This is where a traditional RDBMS with its neatly defined, and related tables can excel. RDBMSs will continue to play an important role in the online environment. They are a solid choice for the transactional backend of online stores.

When it comes to building the next, biggest Web-3.0 destination in the world, relying solely on a SQL-based database is not the best choice. They are terrible at scaling in situations where you have millions of concurrent users. And if you are building the newest killer Social Web service, you better plan ahead for the possibility of having millions of users.

The moral of the story? If your smartup is primarily a user-centric, Social-Web service, then there is little benefit derived from using a database engine optimized for transactional data integrity. Instead of relying on a RDBMS for the data store, one of the new breeds of NOSQL data stores may be better suited.

Scaling RDBMSs versus NOSQL Databases

Note: This section is my best, current understanding of the nuances between read and write operations in relational versus non-relational database models. If you have a clearer understanding, please provide any suggested corrections in the comments section.

Here are a few definitions you need to better understand scaling:

• Scaling up (also called vertical scaling) occurs within a single server
• Scaling out (also called horizontal scaling) occurs by adding additional servers

In brief, scaling really means nothing more than improving the speed of data input and output. It is about increasing data access operations per second. Thus, when faced with data access bottleneck issues, a startup first scales up (within a given server) then scales out by spreading the data across additional servers.

This is accomplished by spending money on hardware in two, primary ways. First, by improving a given box’s (server’s) performance by adding more memory, faster hard drives (to speed up I/O—input/output; writes and reads), and faster network interface cards. Then, if that is not sufficient, more boxes are thrown at the problem, expanding beyond a single box.

NOSQL databases do not have complex SQL-based read operations. Instead, they push the burden of computation to the write end of the equation.

What are the issues with scaling a RDBMS versus a NOSQL database?

In a typical RDBMs, efficiency in reads can be obtained be replication of data across multiple database instances—that can be done on the same physical server but it’s best if done across multiple servers. However, replication does not scale writes. To gain write efficiency requires the partitioning of data creating what is commonly referred to as a distributed database system. In a RDBMS, data can be partitioned either via sharding (horizontal) or functional partitioning (vertical).

When it comes to RDBMSs, once your write volume, database size, or some nebulous combination of both, get to the point were it is too much for one machine to handle, your only option is to partition the database. This is not a trivial process. There are a number of sharding schemes from which to pick, each with advantages and disadvantages.

Although the term sharding is relatively new (the term was coined in the mid 1990’s), it is only a new name applied to a much older database management practice of breaking up databases into logical partitions. Sharding is not a visionary or revolutionary concept created in the past decade or so. It was first conceived of and put into practice at least as far back as the early 1970s. Thus, it is a 40-year-old vision that has simply been rebranded.

But, there is more to the read versus write issue. By design, relational databases are more read-burdened than write-burdened. This is primarily the result of the computational requirements of the SQL operations which are read intensive. So, even with a properly sharded RDBMS database, the issue of being read-burdened still exists.

What does this mean in practice? Why do the SQL-based read operations cause the bottle neck? The answer is that distributed joins are difficult to perform efficiently. Complex joins are slow enough when performed on a single database, but when the database is sharded over multiple machines, the task becomes harder. The more machines, the greater the challenge.

Using a NOSQL database model does not mean you will never have to distribute your data across multiple machines. Once you have scaled up as far as your single server node will allow, you will have to shard the DB and scale out.

Even with a dataset that encodes lots of complexity, a graph database can theoretically scale up with several billions of objects and their associated relations without a noticeable decline in performance. More than likely, a RDBMS would have to have been sharded and scaled out much sooner and the performance would noticeably suffer.

Note: Some of the NOSQL database models distribute their data via other methods than sharding. Furthermore, not all of the NOSQL DBs are distributed. However, those that are not are working on making their model truly distributed. This is a topic beyond the scope of this article.

A Web-3.0 smartup can never know when it will need to scale next. It must remain flexible if it is to successfully meet the growing needs of its data ecosystem. When it comes to scalability, being read-burdened is not a desirable scenario since response time (returning data for display) is more mission critical to Social-Web smartups than write time.

When it comes to the data storage and management needs of your smartup, there is one, big question that you should ask: How can we model our entire data ecosystem for seamless scalability? Cost, effort, and long-term effectiveness are three big factors to consider when answering that question.

Meet the NOSQL Family: the New Kid On the Block?

If you think that NOSQL is the new kid on the block, you could not be further from the truth.

Some of the NOSQL database models are older than the Relational DB model. At least in academia, graph databases existed before the relational model was first presented in a June 1970 paper by Edgar Frank Codd. But RDBMSs, for a number of reasons, caught on and were instrumental in helping to build a successful, global IT industry. Their use has also been very influential in the successful development and proliferation of Web-based services on the Internet, from Web 1.0 through Web-2.0.

Below is a listing of some of the more prominent NOSQL database solutions. They are not listed in any particular order of importance nor do I necessarily endorse them by their inclusion in the chart. For an exhaustive list of NOSQL databases, visit this link.

Most readers will be familiar with the two most popular Open-Source RDBMS engines—PostgreSQL and MySQL. But there is a freemium database jewel that continues to evolve to be responsive to the needs of Web 3.0—OpenLink Virtuoso. It is not a pure NOSQL model, and therefore not listed in the above chart, however it is nonetheless worth considering. Virtuoso is a hybrid DBMS covering the best of the pure RDBMS and pure NOSQL worlds. It offers the following models: Relational, Graph, Document, and XML. As such, Virtuoso could be the ideal solution for a smartup.

Key/Value Databases

• Voldemort
• Redis
• Scalaris

Columnar Databases

• HBase
• Hypertable
• Cassandra

Document Databases

• Mongo DB
• CouchDB

Graph Databases

• Neo4J
• InfoGrid

The Proof is in the Digital Pudding

Some of the Web’s largest properties have experienced scaling issues with RDBMS-based data warehousing. What did they do? They went looking for acceptable, non-relational database models to help them effectively and efficiently scale their data operations. They discovered that the NOSQL database model was a perfect fit for part of their data storage needs.

Some chose to code their own columnar database storage solution: Google created Bigtable; Facebook created Cassandra. Others chose to code their own key-value storage solution: Amazon created Dynamo; LinkedIn created Voldemort. Cassandra and Voldemort have since been open sourced.

What were the benefits? Instead of using its existing MySQL database to power its new search feature, Facebook created Cassandra. It accrued a significant performance boost (see slide 21). With one of its 50GB data stores, what used to take MySQL roughly a third of a second to write or read a data element, Cassandra sliced the write time by a factor or 2,500 and the read time by a factor of 22. In both cases, that is a significant gain in performance.

Twitter is another great example. Up until early 2010, it was common to see the Fail Whale on a regular basis, often multiple times a day. Even with Twitter’s dedicate operations staff, they still had difficulties keeping their hundreds of MySQL machines efficiently working. Eventually they realized that throwing more money at beefing up servers, putting more servers online, and hiring more IT staff was not the solution.

Their solution? Twitter switched from MySQL to a NOSQL solution. At first they tried Cassandra but apparently that did not meet their needs. Twitter has since switched back to MySQL, but with a very, crucially-important twist.

They are not using MySQL as a RDBMS. Instead, they are using it as a data bucket, a storage engine. They’ve created their own Graph Database with an equally impressive middleware layer, called Gizzard, that handles the partitioning layer. They’ve also open sourced their solutions.

So, although they are using MySQL, they have created their own NOSQL graph database solution. You can read the linked-to article to see the results.

The moral of these stories? SQL-based databases are terrible at scaling. They are best used for highly complex, transactional-based data where data persistence (durability, concurrency) is mandated—such as storage of data for financial applications and online stores.

This is where the power of non-relational data models flourish in the Web sphere. NOSQL databases do not have complex SQL-based read operations. Instead, they push the burden of computation to the write end of the equation. This results in a marked improvement in overall performance right off the bat even on a single machine. But the real beauty is that scaling many of the non-relational databases is a relatively trivial task—unlike their RDBMS brethren.

To SQL or Not To SQL. Is That the Question?

The issue of whether to use a RDBMS, a NOSQL database, or some combination of the two is not something with which to be concerned if you envision your site as being small or even medium sized. In that case, moderate scalability will most likely not be too big of an issue. It is probably best to use the tools with which you are most familiar.

A niche social-networking site using an RDBMS with a decent data schema should perform adequately with many thousands of unique users. For instance, the vast majority of blog installs–even those with more sophisticated addons such as the new BuddyPress plugin suite for Worpdress—should perform fine under moderate load even though the data foundation is setup for sharded partitioning on a MySQL backend.

The data schema of some of these Open Source blogging and social networking platforms are pre-configured for sharded data storage. This does not mean that these systems are self scaling. In fact, they are not that easy to scale. Once a second physical server is required, a significant manual reconfiguration of the database serving environment is necessary to split the shards between different servers.

Whereas there are plugins and alternate data access classes that can be utilized, the point here is that the use of a traditional RDBMS does not lend itself to easy scaling as it is the read end, not the write end, of the equation that is the real bottleneck. And sharding is done to improve the write end, not the read end.

Comparison of Database Models

The following graph is my compilation and interpretation of others’ attempts at graphically representing the database-model ecosystem in terms of scalability and data complexity. It is an idealized representation at best, used more for demonstrating some salient differences between models. Although each database model is positioned relative to each other based on what others have reported, the placements are approximations and are not meant to be exact.

One final, important note about the graph to the left. The appearance of a single, sweeping arc to represent RDBMS performance should not be interpreted to mean that the NOSQL database models do not have their own performance arcs. They do. See the next chart (insert Performance Arcs chart).

General Interpretation

Please do not use this as the definitive proof that NOSQL DBs are better than relational DBs. That is not the case. Each database model has its use. Each database model is a different tool used for a different job. The major point is that in the Social Web, smartups cannot use a RDBMS as the only tool for every job. A RDBMS is not a universal tool.

For an RDBMS, scalability and performance become more difficult as the complexity of the dataset increases. This of course has significant ramifications for the Social Web.

The Social/Semantic Zone: I’ve created an imaginary bifurcation point–more accurately a transition zone–that I call the Social/Semantic Zone. Whereas all the DBMS models can handle semantically-encoded data, there are differences in performance as the complexity of the dataset increases. Once again, this zone is rather arbitrary. The point is to draw attention to the real issue of the difficulties of managing all data types as the number of social connections and complexity of datasets increase.

90% Threshold: This is another rather arbitrary line with a non-arbitrary meaning. Whereas the positioning of the line is not exacting, the message is simple. Approximately 90 percent of all Web-based companies will never experience the data volume that the top 10 percent of the most successful Web-2.0 social networks do. This does not necessarily mean you have nothing to worry about and can just fall back on exclusively using a RDBMS. It does mean, though, that unless your smartup skyrockets to fame, you should have an easier job of managing your data ecosystem as long as you’ve picked the proper database models (tools) for your smartup’s data storage and management needs.

Whereas in general the above graph is a good representation of the relative strengths of each database model, real-world experience in using the various models, the quality of the business-intelligence (business logic) coding in the application layer, and the complexity within each smartup’s data ecosystems affect results. As an example, some engineers are better than others at tuning and optimizing their RDBMS whereas inexperienced engineers trying out a NOSQL database model for the first time may significantly undertune the interface.

The important take away is that certain database models are better at scaling versus handling complex datasets. The most interesting point is that a RDBMS’s ability to scale to size quickly decreases as the complexity of the dataset increases.

This last point demonstrates that all things being equal, there are clearly distinct usage cases where leveraging the proper database model will accrue significant increases in efficiency and performance.

Major sources for charts:

• A NOSQL Overview And The Benefits Of Graph Databases (nosql east 2009)
• Django and Neo4j – Domain modeling that kicks ass
• NOSQL: scaling to size and scaling to complexity
• MongoDB Design Philosophy

Moving Beyond the RDBMS

The days when relational databases are used for the entire data storage needs of a Web-based startup are over. The Web is shifting from a monopolistic to a pluralistic database technology culture. As startups power up to become smartups, they’ll analyze their data needs, determining the suite of database models (RDBMS and NOSQL) that best fit their data asset ecosystem.

When designing the back-end data system for your Web-3.0 smartup, the relevant thought process should be thinking about database layers instead of a single database solution. Only through properly assessing your smartup’s overall data asset ecosystem, will you be able to determine how wide and deep that database layer may need to be.

Whereas it is possible that some smartups might be able to stick with using just one type of database storage engine, it is more than likely that at least two different types may be required at some point. The optimal data warehousing solution may not be apparent for sometime. However, if a smartup is practicing lean (and keen), agile-focused development, the best solution will emerge over time as system performance is continually fine tuned based on user experience and feedback.

This coming Monday, September 20, 2010, I will be publishing article four, the last article, in my Powering Startups to Become Smartups series. We will explore the seemingly-less technical, but just as important topic of the Web 3.0 Business Space.

Additional Resources

• Graphs in the database: SQL meets social networks
• Scalable Databases – From Relational Databases To Polyglot Persistence
• Is the Relational Database Doomed?
• InfoGrid Core Ideas
• Graph Databases and the Future of Large-Scale Knowledge Management
• A detailed analysis of part of the NOSQL landscape
• Interview With Eliot Horowitz – CTO Of 10gen / MongoDB

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</Smartups Series Part 3 of 5>

Continue on to Part 4—Web 3.0 Smartups: the New Web Business Space

Other Smartup Series Installments

Part 1 — Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups

Part 2 — Web 3.0 Smartups: the Social Web and the Web of Data

Part 4 — Web 3.0 Smartups: the New Web Business Space

Part 5 — Building the Social Web: the Layers of the Smartup Stack

In the first installment of my Web 3.0 series, Powering Startups to Become Smartups, I presented a general overview of the Web’s evolving paradigm. I made the argument that today’s Web-based startups needed to step outside the current Web-2.0 box and think like a Web-3.0 company. By leveraging the power of Web 3.0, a common-place startup could transform itself into a smartup.

In this second installment, I’m going to talk about what most people think of when they hear the term Web 3.0—the Semantic Web or Web of data. In the process, I hope to correct some common misconceptions about what the Semantic Web is and what it is not.You need to think outside the factory that makes all the boxes

For those of you fluent in Semantic Web technologies, this article may seem simple. But I think it will still provide you with some useful ammunition for convincing hesitant parties to embrace the Web of Data. For those who hunger for more after reading this, I have provided a listing of additional resources at the end of this article—from general introductions to the Web of Data to detailed implementation guides.

A Tangled Web We Weave

Before I go into more detail, it is imperative that we define a few terms and concepts. The Web of Data goes by a number of names, with two competing movements marketing their vision for its implementation. Whereas I often use the term Semantic Web, I do so in the broadest sense of the term, as a synonym to the term Web of Data. From outside the technologists’ debates, I believe that the concept of a Web of Data might be the most apt description of the foundation of Web 3.0. Why is that the case?

As a keen observer of nature all of my life, and as a trained scientist, I instantly understood the broader concepts of the Web of Data (a.k.a. Linked Data, the Semantic Web). The ecological web and the Web of Data are similar in theory. The Web of Data is humanity’s meta-food web, where homogeneous participants (i.e. humans; a single species) with varying heterogenous needs, all produce and consume data in an interconnected, thriving, vibrant, and interdependent information ecosystem.

The unit of trade, the least common denominator, in Web 1.0 was the file or document. With Web 3.0, the Web of Data, the units of trade are data, the information that is contained within files or within databases. In the Web of Files, the links between documents are hyperlinks. In the Web of Data, the links, the threads that join the data, are URIs. This creates what Nova Spivack and Henry Story call hyperdata.

As I state in my article, A Flock of Twitters:

Web browsers navigate hypertext; Semantic Web applications navigate hyperdata—data that is encoded with semantic markup and interconnected to other semantically-coded data in other locations. So, whereas hypertext is text linking to other text (documents), hyperdata is data linking to other data.

Thus a key piece of Web 3.0 is the concept of the linking of data throughout and across the Web.

A final term that needs to be discussed before proceeding is the word semantics.

The Semantics of Semantics

When talking about the Semantic Web, there is a common misconception regarding the definition of “semantics” (yes, that is ironic). In a nutshell, semantic means meaning. In regards to the Semantic Web, it refers to the meaning and relationship between data.

So it is not surprising to me when I see blog posts, forum threads, or even Twitter conversations where people seem to think that the Semantic Web is simply about tagging their posts, using microformats, or adding micro or nanosyntax to their tweets. As a WordPress / BuddyPress developer, when conversations about the Semantic Web come up, it is not uncommon for fellow developers to make the same mistake.

There is another common misconception having to do with the word semantics as its applied to the Web. When we speak of semantic technologies and Semantic Web technologies, we are referring to two different sets of technologies with different purposes. When speaking of Semantic Web technologies, we are not referring to AI (artificial intelligence) functions for natural language processing. Whereas some semantic technologies can be complimentary, Semantic Web technologies deal with modeling relationships between data to help machines understand and discover connections.

When people talk about tagging of blog or social network content–within Twitter or Facebook, for instance–they are talking about what is traditionally referred to as folksonomies. This is different than semantically tagging the upper-level data with an underlying layer of metadata.

Tagging allows for user classification of content. This type of content can be described as metadata to be seen by people. While a powerful concept, it has its draw backs. For instance, as these two classic examples demonstrate, user-generated classification is often ambiguous.

When a user tags some content “Apple”, to what are they referring? Is it the fruit called apple, is it the company Apple, Inc., is it a tag for a picture of an apple tree, or is it someone’s nickname? There is no way to clearly determine the underlying meaning of that tag.

If a user refers to the person “Bill Gates” in a post, do they mean Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, Inc., or do they mean one of the many other people on Earth with the same name?

Most platforms that allow user-generated tagging do not filter tags or check for potentially redundant classifiers. For instance, it is not uncommon to see the tags “internet”, “web”, “interweb”, or even “Intertubes” used to refer to the same object. Although this redundancy might make it easier for user searches, it can lead to confusion. Of course, we all know that the Web is only part of the Internet and that the term interweb is a tongue-in-check reference to those that do not know the difference.

With regards to Web 3.0, semantic tagging (also called markup or encoding) is not the same thing as user-generated tagging. Tags, while useful, do not provide sufficient metadata. They do not indicate the relationship between the tag and the object it references. Semantic tagging generates metadata to be seen by machines, not people.

In Web 3.0, both types of tagging will continue: the Web-2.0 practice of people tagging posts, pictures, and documents for the benefit of other people; and the semantic tagging of upper-level data with an underlying layer of metadata.

Microformats: I will not go into the debate about how microformats can usher in the Web of Linked Data—suffice it to say I believe it cannot. It is important to know that what the Microformats community calls POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML) is not the same thing as semantic markup which uses RDF classes and properties to model relationships between data. In short, microformats are primarily for people, not machines. They do not facilitate machine understanding. In order for the Web of Data to self-organize, the interconnections must be autodiscoverable, not pieced together be people. This is a prime example of the difference between hyperlinks and hyperdata.

But user-generated content is meant for people to see. Machines have a difficult time “seeing and understanding” the human-readable content. This results in the need for complex search algorithms just to squeeze out relatively-useful search results. Furthermore, any associations between disparate datasets almost always has to be made by a human being.

Semantic tagging, on the other hand, helps to structure the upper-level data, via an encoded metadata layer, thereby making it machine-readable, machine-processable, machine-interpretable. This makes data more easily searchable and queryable, facilitating in the autodiscovery of connections between data.

Why is semantic encoding beneficial? In the example above, proper semantic encoding would provide a clear definition of what the user was referring to when they wrote Apple or Bill Gates. The meaning would not be ambiguous. So, what disambiguates the relationship between the word and the meaning?

The Vocabulary of the Web of Data

As I discussed above, semantic tagging (marking up) of upper-level data via an encoded metadata layer creates an additional layer of data for machine consumption. But what does this mean and how does it make data that is machine-readable, machine-processable, machine-interpretable; how does it facilitate data discovery?

In the Semantic Web, data are typically marked up using a stack of W3C-specific technologies, in particular the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Ontology Language (OWL). RDF is a machine-processable language that represents information about data (or other resources). OWL is a set of languages that offer vocabularies (ontologies) for representing the unambiguous relationships between data.

The W3C stack provides a standardized way of encoding data without the need for a central controlling authority or proprietary software. This means that semantic markup is abstracted from a reliance on a particular database technology and users have the flexibility to expand or define new vocabularies.

Through the use of globally unique names in the form of uniform resource identifiers (URIs), RDF triples are created to represent relationships between the subject and the object. By using differing ontologies, different relationships between data can be described.

In its simplest form, an RDF triple takes the form of subject, predicate, object. Each component of the triple contains a URI. The subject and object contain URIs that locate (point to) them while the predicate usually uses a URI to describe the relationship. This relationship is defined in the classes and properties of a given ontology.

Triples are stored in a database, in various formats, in what are appropriately called triple stores. Data that are semantically encoded via RDF triples can be discovered via SPARQL—the query language for RDF. Semantic Web-powered sites expose their data to the rest of the Web via what is called a SPARQL endpoint.

So, using the example above, we would indicate with the following simple triple that we were talking about Apple, Inc. and not apple the fruit or Apple a pet pangolin:

Subject: Apple

Predicate: is a type of

Object: Company

Of course the above triple is not expressed in RDF form. The proper form would contain appropriate URIs for each component.

Note: It’s important to mention that there are other triple-based data models besides subject, predicate, object—the entity-attribute-value (EAV) triple, for instance, or the node-edge-node object triple in a graph database.

Relationships can be better defined and further refined by using additional ontologies (vocabularies). New ontologies can easily be created to provide a new set of classes and properties with which to describe relationships.

Here are a few, popular ontologies, some specifically important to the Social Web:

• Dublin Core
• FOAF (Friend of a Friend)
• SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities)
• SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System)
• GoodRelations (Web Ontology for E-Commerce)

You might have heard about RDFa and may be wondering about the differences between RDF and RDFa. As this is not an in-depth, technical discussion of Semantic Web technologies, I’ve glossed over much of the specifics. In brief, RDF (which comes in various serializations) is for machine consumption only whereas RDFa allows machine-readable data to be combined with human-readable data via the HTML format.

The Social Web: An Emergent Property of the Web of Data

When data are semantically encoded with the proper technologies for their discovery put in place, they become exposed to the rest of the Web. This opens up the Web creating a true information ecosystem.

Web 3.0 is thus about creating a Web of Data that is interconnected and open, whereas Web 2.0 is about creating network services that attract users to store more data on the Web but keep that data cloistered in closed silos. Usability, discoverability, portability, and user-control are an after thought (and usually a not-at-all thought) to Web-2.0 boxes. To Web-3.0 smartups, these issues are integral to their service.

I’ve already discussed at length the differences between Social Networks and the Social Web. I will not rehash those details here. Suffice it to say that there is a big difference between these two concepts and their underpinning and differentiating technologies.

A keen smartup is a lean startup that wisely embraces the Social Web and the Web 3.0 paradigm.

The Social Web is an emergent property of the Web of Data. It is a logical outcome of the Web’s increasing social connectivity and the semantification of data to make it machine understandable, discoverable, and open.

Users are growing tired of having to reenter pieces of their social graph into each new Web-2.0-style social network that comes along. They’re also beginning to realize that they have few tools to effectively manage their identity across the Web. Those smartups that innovate with these user concerns in mind will profit the most from the Web-3.0 paradigm.

When startups think like smartups, they design their data architecture and utilize a data infrastructure that allows for the opening of their data to the rest of the Web. They focus on providing users a mechanism for controlling and managing their IdentitySpace via WebIDs and Web-based access control lists—both of these made possible in part by Semantic Web technologies.

As more datasets become semantically linked and open to machine autodiscovery, a critical mass will build, resulting in a true Web of Data. The ultimate actualization of this concept is sometimes referred to as the Giant Global Graph. This is the stage where a Global Meta-Database Management System (GMDBMS) emerges, where data stored in disparate locations can be globally queried and integrated into a federated database.

Now that you’re smartening up to the benefits and power of the Web of Data, the next step to explore is the Web 3.0 dataspace. This Friday, we venture into the technological challenges of data storage and management in the Social Web.

Semantic Web Resources

Since it is difficult to succinctly and accurately describe the Semantic Web in layman’s terms, I encourage you to read other sources and become well versed in the Semantic Web—its concepts, underlying technologies, and the ways in which your smartup can participate.

Here are a few additional resources that will help you become better versed in Web 3.0 and Semantic Web issues.

Books

• The Social Semantic Web
• Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business
• Programming the Semantic Web

Videos

• Highly recommend this introduction to the Web of Data by Kate Ray: film – web 3.0
• An excellent, animated explanation. The Future Internet Video: Service Web 3.0
• Ted Talk: Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web
• Making Sense of the Semantic Web
• RDFa Basics

Web Articles

• Looking ahead to Linked Data on the Web
• W3C Semantic Web FAQ
• What is the Semantic Web really all about?
• Understanding Linked Data via EAV Model based Structured Descriptions

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</Smartups Series Part 2 of 5>

Continue on to Part 3—Web 3.0 Smartups: Moving Beyond the Relational Database

Other Smartup Series Installments

Part 1 — Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups

Part 3 — Web 3.0 Smartups: Moving Beyond the Relational Database

Part 4 — Web 3.0 Smartups: the New Web Business Space

Part 5 — Building the Social Web: the Layers of the Smartup Stack