exactly, if I want this type of investment, I would just have bought GM stock.

can honestly say Star Trek is something that never caught my attention or interest

Sleeping on planes until reaching their destination? That is a pretty impressive super power. Nothing worse than waking up (when you want to sleep) and realizing that you are only halfway there.

I drove it a bit myself. Very interesting what they are doing but you are right, you have to understand what the engine is doing (i.e. adding additive filters as you click in the categorical navigation).

It is striking how similar to the approach is the Search 2.0 product features that Dow Jones Factiva had when I was there; we launched that in 2005. But similar visualization based filtering using index-based search and further filtering capability. I do like the addition of sentiment into the equation that FT shows. There simply needs to more progress made in this space, the content sets are increasing exponentially, far faster than the advanced search/filter analysis tools out there.

First, completely agree with you. These social platforms are only as good as the content generated. People need Facebook more than Facebook needs its users (for now), and Facebook will use this method until something better comes along, is competitive and solves users' pain points.

Second, I find it remarkable that this is the first comment on this post and this post has been on the cover of Techmeme all day. I think this continues to be a point of the decentralization of conversation and quite honestly, fragmentation. I find myself checking six different places now when I make a comment to see if it is being discussed in a different platform, completely insane. How many levels of aggregation, normalization and abstraction can we have on user-generated content? I think we are finding out.

I think we now need to define what 'easy' means in this space. Sending an email is easy. Searching on Google is easy. Writing code for the everyday web user is not easy. The everyday consumer and prosumer just want stuff to work, they don't even want the acronyms. See RSS.

But the development community who is going to drive the platform development and much of the cloud agenda as more consumer facing services are developed on top of it are the ones that are going to have to deal with this stuff and make it as easy as possible for other developers in the ecosystem to develop using their cloud-based solutions. And yes, they are going to want it to be easier, on demand and have as little hiccups as possible. I compare the cloud development environment similar to the generations of compilers and integrated development environments.

But this stuff is going to stay away from 'mom'. It has to.

First, the title of this post alone should bring them in by the thousands!

Second, we are going to have two different sets of adoption/use problems in the cloud. On the "enterprise" side, I'm confident that these will be worked out. The API is not a new concept and while some of the technical problems will be new ones, I think collaboration between development groups will get us through the lion share. There will be problems though, all new things bring them, just like APIs continue to demand that throttling and access being managed thoughtfully.

On the "consumer" side, problems take one a much bigger issue because users, for the most part, are not going to debug errors being thrown in the browser due to implementation problems. This will be no different than with using web sites. Most people do not going looking through URI encoding or name value pairs in the query string to figure out why there is an issue. I know my mom isn't going to, like most, she is going to say "this isn't working" and then call me.

Thanks Brad. Clear that as long as there is mutual trust and thus expectation setting, it is a best practice to have this data available to all. I would suspect also it makes board meetings that more productive and strategic because members already have solid gauge on trends and thus the summary reports are review. The rest of the (if everyone has this background) can be put to greater discussion points such as action steps and strategic conversations.

Thanks for the list of data points, this will prove useful for anyone thinking through management/board dashboard initiatives.

Brad: My question takes a different angle. While transparency between board and the company is critical to move the company forward and all the information is shared transparently at board meetings anyway, it also seems with daily data transparency, there has be strong implicit trust to make this data readily available. Without it, it seems there is a risk that daily data going to all increases the risk to not giving the team time to digest, react and move accordingly before board involvement. How do you balance how you use the data and when you "get involved" based on the data? Would be interested in your perspective.

Brad: Definitely flipping the equation will help. Users have the data store centrally (perhaps cloud-based) and then configure the services to come and retrieve so that they can do their thing. At a minimum, this is why data portability has to take hold.

Earlier this week, I was speaking with Jeff Nolan and we got to talking about Teqlo. While I was intrigued about their concept, I thought it was ahead of its time because the average consumer isn't going to build their own application (or at least they need something where they don't even know they are building an application.) Kind of like everyone doesn't know they are using RSS right? :)

Anyway, something Teqlo-like would be interesting. Have a weight module where you populate your central data store and it has data rights to deploy those couple pieces of data out to those services. Synchronization (and synchronization rights) could be another killer platform capability in this realm once it takes off.