A few months back I was brainstorming Internet startup ideas in a bar in midtown, New York City (great bar by the way) and one of the ideas that we came up with was sort of a social network for data. The concept was a centralized database infrastructure where anyone who wanted could upload data sets that they had created to share, trade or sell. We never got far with the idea but at the time it sounded pretty cool - subject to the effects of three glasses of single malt of course.

Of course like all good ideas, there are many others out there who are thinking along the same lines. Bret Taylor, formerly of Google expressed the same desire in his blog and Read Write Web published a list of current sites that allow you to share data sets in some way.

I’ve played with a few of these sites and while they are interesting, the thing I keep coming back to is that they need to be much easier to use. I think the problem here is that most of the existing sites are built for techies by techies and as a result aren’t very user centric. It should be as easy for a university researcher with a huge, complicated data set to share it, as Joe Smith down the block who has a passion for coin collecting and has documented (with pictures) every US penny minted from 1850 to today and wants to share what he’s built.

The site that always comes to mind when I think about this topic is Geni.com. They have made a complicated data issue – geological research – really really easy. I put my direct family into the tool about six months ago on a whim and at last count my relatives have added 2000+ people to the tree with pictures, email addresses, birthdays and all sorts of data. If my aunt who can barely turn on her computer can do it then the tool has met the usability test. The other tool that comes to mind is FileMaker – creating data sets in it was brain dead simple.

What is necessary in this particular space is to make it really easy to model complex data elements. The startup that manages to do it will win and should be huge. If they also allow people to connect data sets together and pull them off to their blogs, websites, and so on then they will really win. Combine the business with either the Amazon or Google cloud computing databases and things get really interesting.

I hope someone solves this soon. I’ll be a user…I love data.

I’ve been a bit delinquent in putting up new posts lately as I’ve been distracted with some other projects but more important I’ve just not found anything that I wanted to write about. There is certainly a lot going on out there as is clear from the latest TechCrunch postings from the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam but so far I’m not seeing much in the way of new trends.

That being said, there are a couple of things that I’ve written about previously that seem to be gaining steam.

Widgets are in general, picking up steam. It seems like daily (hourly?) you hear of yet another Facebook widget or iGoogle widget that is going to change your life. No some of these are pretty cool, don’t get me wrong, but I’m beginning to wonder whether we are seeing a fundamental break between a self contained, fully functional site like WebMD that solves a specific problem and a world in which everything is a collection of much more specialized widgets that you access from lots of different channels - and ideally follow you around from channel to channel.

This is worth more thought (and postings!) in the future. I’m also waitig for a widget search engine to launch - finding all these things is a major pain today.

The other rumor I thought was particularly interesting was the one about Google launching a cloud database solution that would compete with the one started awhile back by Amazon. As I’ve written before, the key with these services is to get true generic, scalability without sacrificing the real power of the database. As every developer knows, often you need to do some funky stuff to get a database to perform which is why I’m really curious as to whether the cloud computing approach will work for the majority of web sites out there - which are the obvious target for these sort of services.

The other really challenge here is not so much getting the database up and running (and scaling), but actually designing and loading it with data. That might be the value add that really gets these services off the ground. Imagine a situation in which you could just grab a set of database components from a central library (say a list of the cities of the world) for use on your web page and someone else would keep them up to date. Now there is a service that would be worth paying for. Oh yeah, and what about loading those feeds.

More to come on this trend I predict.

The talk of the day seems to be all about widgets. Widgets on your desktop, widgets on your homepage, widgets on your blog - widgets are going to take over the world. The funny thing is that they actually might if there is every any standardization.

I was checking out NetVibes this morning which is a site I’ve looked at previously and while the concept is pretty interesting, I just cannot get my head around having yet another page I need to check out every morning. There is definitely an advantage to having everything in one place but with tabbed browsers, I don’t find going to multiple sites that onerous anymore.

Yet the concept of being able to encapsulate everything I care about on the net in nice, bite sized chunks that I can organize as I please is really compelling. Now if only everyone playing with widgets would focus on getting it right for the user we might have something worth getting excited about.

The trend here that I think is interesting is a movement away from “web-sites” to small, information rich mini-sites that you can plop down anywhere you please. This has huge implications for branding and distribution of content (and for search actually, and advertising…you get the idea).

Consider a world where there are really no websites to speak of, but everyone shoves out their content in small increments that are very customized to the user’s preference. Interested in the Boston Red Sox but don’t care about all those other teams (ok, I live in Boston…I admit it)? Simple, grab the Boston Red Sox widget from MLB and a similar one from ESPN and drop it on your homepage, your desktop, your phone - wherever you like to satisfy your baseball addiction.

Want to show off your stock picking acumen? Snag a portfolio widget from your favorite financial news source, set it up with all your picks and attach it to your FaceBook page, your blog and again drop it onto the your phone (so you can make sure it is something you want to show off). Basically put it wherever you want (your AppleTV?)

Widgets that give you what you want and follow you where you go - no browser needed. It is a compelling concept and definitely a trend worth watching.

Yesterday a post on Google’s blog announced Knol, a new service they’ve begun beta testing. While most of the ensuing blog commentary focused on the service’s similarities to wikipedia, what’s more notable are the differences.

  (click for full-size screenshot)The most obvious difference is the social-networking aspect of the service. Rather than imitating wikipedia’s obscure (though effective) community-editing process that relies on a few thousand volunteers to maintain quality, Knol looks like it’s adopting a youTube-style quality rating approach to help users surface the best content. It’s not clear whether random visitors will be able to edit articles, my guess is that the feature will exist but most authors (since their mugs are prominently featured next to the article) will lock their articles.

The other difference is the presence of ads on the pages. This is pretty obvious, since the only reason Google would want to get into something like this is to provide yet another venue where it can monetize traffic. Just think of all those millions of wikipedia pageviews with no ads, how wasteful! The inclusion of ads will be up to the author of a given page, but in order to encourage inclusion, Google will share revenue from the ads (no mention of percentages yet).

Not that different from AdSense at first glance, but the fact that they’re providing the entire content platform makes a big difference. While setting up a blog has become almost trivially easy, there are presumably many people out there who just want to write content without any management overhead whatsoever. Associated Content was one of the first to provide such an offering and have amassed millions of pages of content, though they only pay a flat $1.50 CPM rather than the pure revenue share Knol is promising. Given Google’s brand and knack for cross-promoting its tools, they’ll likely do much better, and you can be sure those pages will be well-represented in its search results.