Microsoft has before it a golden goose, it’s up to them to decide whether to continue starving it or to feed it. The first step is to look at where they have already invested: everywhere, from the enterprise through to the cloud and mobile systems. They have a wide base and a tall hierarchy, but they aren’t capitalizing as successfully as they could or even should be.

Why are they failing? It comes down to 3 reasons: horrific marketing, horrific web presence, and lack of integrated focus.  The one I’m primarily wanting to touch on is their lack of integrated focus, because without it they are gone, but I’ll touch on the other two.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft released an update to their Office Live system, something that has been around for nearly 3 years, and yet many people still have no clue about. Why; why doesn’t anyone know about this? It is common for people to bash Microsoft, because they don’t offer a cloud alternative for the desktop Office Suite, but it’s simply not true. Who’s fault is this? It’s the marketing department, they haven’t bothered to promote the platform; it’s also partly due to how confusing Microsoft’s web presence is, it’s anything but simple. Their presence exists in two ends of the spectrum: a mangled mess of links to variations of systems on their main domains and a group of domains that can be hard to find, because of a lack of directions to them. So what they need is a simplified interface, and user direction, from both marketing and a user experience standpoint.

Microsoft, regardless of their poor marketing and website design, has a unique opportunity. Microsoft, is the only company to have an operating system on 4 platforms(enterprise, desktop, mobile, and consoles), a web presence that includes search, email, and cloud systems(enterprise & consumer), high-quality desktop software, and near-universal hardware support. The one thing they are missing in integration across all of these levels, and it makes them look like they are wandering aimlessly. The need to figure out what to focus on, and how to make the entire system more seamless.

My first recommendation to them is to start with the future of the desktop, quick boot systems that allow near instant access to the internet. I propose that they provide a hybrid-OS offering using an instant-on system, that provides access to a browser and several other basic applications. The next recommendation, is one I’ve already made, clean up your web interfaces to make them more user-friendly, and make your cloud systems more prevalent. After you’ve dealt with these issues, you’re ready to more actively promote systems like Live Mesh, that will allow you to integrate and sync cloud data, across multiple systems; I recommend purchasing DropBox to help with this.  The should continue to work on integrating Office and their cloud systems, during this.

In the foreseeable future, the majority of what we will be doing, will be on the internet, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t need our fully developed operating systems. Using a hybrid-OS approach, they will be able to provide both instant-on support for average use case, while still providing the ability to switch over to the full system for heavier workloads. This is what we need in the next few years, ChromeOS can match you in the first, but not the second, except via remote-desktop support. One issue with instant-on systems, is trying to get universal support, but Microsoft is at an advantage as it’s already worked with low-level compatibility, are there going to be hitches, I’m sure, but they should still have some ability to solve this problem, along with manufacturers.

Next step is to make their web presence more coherent and simple.  Promote your integrated services together, rather than splitting them across different domains, you have two live office platforms, three email services, and a search engine, and none of them are connected in a highly sensible way. You’ve also failed at promoting these from your main website, because of the kludgy method of navigation and association among your many many products. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. It’s all about simplification so that your users can find what they are looking for; help them out.

Now, you’re doing okay on this next thing, you’ve got Skydrive and Live Mesh, as well as Office 2010 integration with Office Live, but you can still do so much more to make it simple. Google is kicking your ass as simple collaboration, you need to get this right, and make sure you’re doing it better than they are. You need to get syncing to both the cloud and to other devices down, that’s why I recommend you purchasing DropBox, it would provide a great starting point.  This is going to be one of the key changes you need to get right, and get it right, now. The sooner you get people  using your system and having it seamlessly integrated between the desktop-mobile-cloud the better you will be.

Maybe they’ve been working on this in the background, and they’re just failing to compile the parts, or they have failed to have vision as to what they actually have, and how it can be connected. Either way, it seems that Ballmer is stumbling in providing his teams the ability to create a fully integrated system, either he has the vision or he doesn’t; I’d go with the latter. Now, is when they need to make the move, get to work on bringing your teams together, so they can create a seamless experience, and hire new marketing people.

Normal class times are generally in the 45-90 minute range, depending on how the school defines it’s periods, I’d prefer a 45 minute course daily. Working with 15 minute intervals makes it simple to repeat the process and to make sure pupils grasp and understand concepts. The key to understanding is simplifying to a key point of information that you want them to understand. This is particularly necessary in Elementary schooling, to build up a foundation of understanding, and problem solving skills.

Minutes: 1-3

Prepare the topic with the pupils, so that they have a basic idea of the concept, you are working on. Provide the pupils with a couple test problems, non-multiple choice, to test their understanding.

Minutes:4-8

This is time for  the pupils to work through the problems to show how much they understand.

Minutes:9-10

Check pupils responses to this work, so you can see  who had issues, and where the issues were. Make sure you are interacting with all of the pupils as a group, and as individuals.

Minutes:11-14

Have a class discussion calling on those that did particularly well, and unwell, to help gather learning concepts that some pupils gathered and others did not, this will help in the future.

Minute:15

Take those that did well and partner them with those that didn’t do as well.

Repeat this process until the end of class or until all but possibly one or two pupils grasp the concept, if they do this give them a 5 minute break, and an example problem for tomorrow’s concept. While most of the class works on this, you should interact with the remaining pupils, that don’t grasp the concept, and help them to understand that concept, as well as the new concept in advance, to help prepare them for tomorrow’s work.

If you can’t get a child or even an adult to understand a concept within 15 minutes, then the problem is most likely with you, and not the pupil(s). If there is a problem, you need to look at how your teaching, what they don’t understand, and what you can do to improve. You have all the data in the work the pupils did, so you can go through and check for where they might be missing the connection.

One benefit to this, is you aren’t overloading the mind with brand new concepts simultaneously, this helps prevent the pupil from feeling overwhelmed.  A second benefit, is that you get to interact with the children one-on-one this is something that is lacking in most classrooms, and likely why the parental influence is a so much greater determining factor. Another benefit is that it is quick, it lets you know if there is a problem that you need to focus on or not, it is also quite fluid.

The fluidity, is the final benefit, which allows you to do a weekly, biweekly, monthly, recovery of knowledge quickly, by recovery I mean returning memory. Memory degrades over time, but if it recurs even slightly enough to re-jog it, it becomes wholly new again, and will last longer, this is the forgetting curve. Following the concept of the forgetting curve, you can cover 4 concepts a week, and still fit a day for recovery for all four concepts into your plan, to help increase retention. Another benefit is that you get to gain more data into how the pupils have retained the concepts, so you can better predict when you’ll have to cover the information, again.

This post is complete conjecture, and isn’t based on any significant facts.

As for what I’m referring to, is my current situation, financial, physically, educationally, and “professionally.” Financially, I’m done, I have about 2 months left to handle my bills, which also places me in a position, where I can’t risk it all on the web, the risk to see a turn-around that quickly, isn’t feasible. So in the upcoming months, the blog might shift, sites will go away, but they won’t die or be lost, I have contingencies in place. Physically, a few months ago, I had doctors tell me that I needed to get my thyroid checked out, because it was enlarged, and I had lost close to 20 lbs. in the course of  six months, I failed to make that appointment, and two months later, I’m down another 12 lbs. I’m not a big guy, I’ve never been over 150, so this is a bit of an issue.

Educationally, this has stalled as well, even though I constantly learn something, it’s becoming more and more of a struggle to learn something that is actually of value. I need to make a change, and become more focused in my learning, this is probably my biggest issue, I research topics, as doing so I follow tangents; which is a very interesting way to learn of a new thing, but it doesn’t help with actually learning. Another issue, is I have very broad interests, one second I can be reading up on Accounting or Marketing, the next I could be reading a text on Algorithm Design, or just doing Calculus, this obviously leads into the professional situation.

I don’t have a clue what I want to do professionally, I know what I wanted as a kid, I know where my interests lie, and I know what I’m good at, but that doesn’t help me figure it out, it just makes it murkier. As a child I always wanted to work with computers and robots, I never thought that I’d step back from this position. My interests over the past five years have been in programming, cryptology, economics, finance, business, and design. What I feel at least somewhat competent at is financial analysis, and architectural design.  This of courses, raises issue with what I should do, because I, honestly, don’t have a clue, finance or trying to make my childhood dream work. I don’t know, but I’m leaning toward the financial aspect, and letting the programs slip to the side, which brings me to the project.

The past two years, I’ve focused into  understanding how to analyze data to create semantic content, one of the biggest moves in my thinking was to take the initial load off of the machine, and place it in the hands of a human, the biological entity that understands the semantics of an item. Let the user build the connections, let them do all of the heavy lifting, and then use these seeded inputs as an ever expanding learning set for the machine. This meant making something usable  for a user to interact with, first it was an RSS Reader, then it was a URL shortener, that handled multiple links, then the idea grew into a distributed network of bundled connections. All of these I’ve managed to fail on in some way, except for the last, I’ve just hit a wall as far as I can go on it, with my understanding.

I thought hard over the past week, about seeking a more technical person, or just releasing the current source of the project, after it’s cleaned up a bit. The first way would have the possibility for a good return, but I oddly feel bad about it, it makes me feel like I failed. So I’ll be working to clean up the code, write out lots of the mental documentations I have, as well as collect and clean up the digital and physical documentation, so that others can take the idea to the next level. Currently, there is already a working model of what I saw it being about three-months down the line, at BagtheWeb, they did some things better, mainly having a fully functional product, not just a prototype, but their product is still in early enough stages that it could be caught and surpassed. I just don’t have time, with having to deal with these other issues, to devote  wholeheartedly to the issue.

So I apologize to the people who did play with the project, and provided quite valuable feedback, it wouldn’t be anywhere close to what it is, even as little as it is without you. It won’t be going anywhere for now, but I also doubt updates for the indefinite future. I just have stuff to sort out first, maybe one day I’ll come back to it, with the passion I had, when I was creating a research tool, with a semantic future.

Homogeneity, in nature, it is as common as a step in the evolutionary process. As species adapt, the mean difference, across the whole corpus of the species, becomes smaller, and the species pick up both positives and negatives, that affect the species future. The huge negative for homogeneity is that the corpus, minus the mutated(outliers), is that susceptibility to a common tragedy. A tragedy, by contagion,  can be common, if a disease does infect one entity, it can easily spread to those that are also susceptible, though the entities with mutated genetics, assuming theses genetics, increase resistance or provide immunity to the disease, or any common tragedy.  If the tragedy is large enough, it can cause the mean difference to go up, or even hit an maxima,  which it comes back down from in favor of the  mutates.

Homogeneity, in business and our daily lives, occurs quite frequently, and it is an influencing factor over choice. To look into the idea of choice and homogeneity, you don’t have to look further than skin deep, or in this case clothing. Every one of us has a desire to fit in, and this desire results in us commonly grouping, even, subconsciously with those who are like us. From this desire, we find ways to look, sound, or interact the same way; our desire also has a side effect, it removes the necessity of thought in many circumstances, just go with what everyone else is doing. Of course, there will always be a few who don’t want to be classified, or collated with others, sadly they create their own group, through these actions: non-conformists.

To see the corporate side of homogeneity, look into the restaurant/fast food industry, or supermarkets. Mom & Pop’s have been gobbled up by the McDonalds and Wal-Marts , because the layperson doesn’t know what they have to offer. If you go with one of these household names, you have a good idea that the food is going to be decent, or that the store will have what you’re looking for within its doors. This homogeneity, decreases local competition, but it’s okay, because it saved the average consumer time and money, because these chains get reductions for ordering extremely large amounts of goods. Of course, some people will stick to the Mom & Pop’s, to be contrarian, or because they know it just as well and it has become ritual.

When it comes to the web, however, the steps toward homogeneity become much easier, but there is even fewer checks and balances, than in any of the other cases. We interact with the web on a time basis, and this time is limited, so we find a subset of sites to stay in constant contact with, normally staying within a triumvirate: search, networking, and news-history. However, the common solutions for these problems are reduced to a common set of sites, there are alternatives, but it requires more rigor on part of the consumer. So what do we do, we choose, by what provides the most tools, where are my friends, and how can I find out more.

What happens when you’re playing this zero-sum game of choice, Louis Gray says there is no zero-sum game?  You end up selecting those that might not be the best, but save you time and trouble. Want to use e-mail, read blogs, or just IM with friends, you can go use any random email host, any old RSS-reader, or link walk the sites, or anyone who offers an IM service, OR you can just use Google, and get all of these services simultaneously, plus several dozen other services.  Do you see what just happened? Multiple services where just reduced, they were hit by a common tragedy, and now there is one hyper-efficient service provider, which most people are going to use because it’s simple, and they don’t have to think about where they are going to go, or what they are going to do.  Where can I share images, discuss things with my close friends and family, and provide a set of personal information for people that people can use as entrance sources? Well there are a large number of services that will let you share images, and any number of places and ways to share that information, but to truly access everyone, without making them do work hard, and that site is becoming Facebook. The case is you don’t see a corresponding 1-1 gain loss, gains are primarily individualistic, while losses are primarily distributed, there are cases where the inverse occurs, but they are few and far between.

These companies are becoming goliaths, that are going to harm the web, if they continue to grow, it won’t happen immediately, but even now Facebook is trying to change the rules. And you can say all you want that there are other services out there, I’ll admit that, but when you’re playing a zero-sum game, based on how much time you spend interacting in different locations, you have to focus on where you’ll get the optimal return.  There will always be alternatives, for those who truly want them, but for the general public, they don’t mind as far as they know, everyone does the majority of the same things on the web. Until, something happens that causes the homogenous species, to see what the mutates have already seen and adapted for we’re looking at an interesting ride for the next 2-3 years.

Still here? Good. This post may be a bit vague, I’m going to try and keep it simple and understandable, for you as well as myself, I’m already a bit confused after several hours of trying to map this. If you would like to discuss this, for a more in depth, though possibly less coherent form, feel free.

To begin, we have three entities: data, meta-data, and users. These entities all have various ranges of relationship, which go from near to distant, and occasionally don’t exist. To describe the range as an example of friends, “Those best-friends, with very similar taste, are near(1), friends, much different taste(2), acquaintances, similar taste(3), acquaintances, different taste(4), and people you’ve never met(0).” We’ll approach range using this method, based on relational distance, between entities.

Data is, in my view, the front facing objects, whether that be text, images, video, or even tactile objects. Data itself exists in a weak presence, as far as to what value it represents, when coupled with meta-data, it becomes stronger.

Meta-data is data about data. It is the entity that is manipulated and understood, to provide us with relationship information, on any level. There are many forms of meta-data, temporal, location, authorship, topics, etc., that provide us with fantastic ways of connecting data, but often times it includes disparate entities, that aren’t necessary.

The user in my case is a human which interprets the regular data, and may create tags of meta-data, but can be a machine in which case it is likely to work with meta-data, either directly or in composition of meta-data from data sources.

Now that the entities are somewhat defined, I can get into the discussion of how these various entities are connected in creating relevant connections, both in basic terms, and user specific terms.

Often times, the simplest way to construct a relevancy map between data objects, is to use meta-data about the objects, social-bookmarking tools work this way by way of topical tagging, the distance between objects is the range of 4. Making the system a bit more complex you add methods, you take your tagged set, and add in user selection, by how much a user likes various items to manipulate what topics they are likely to see, this is in the range of 3 because it is still picking out items by topic which is a very wide. Or you can provide what your user’s friends have read recently, this is still in the range of 3, because by adding in what other people read, can narrow the area of focus, it’s possible to be in areas that the user doesn’t care as much for. If you add in what the user’s friends like, rather than just what they read, you get closer to the range of 2.

In order to get to the optimal range 1 you have to add two more things to your system: direct relations between data-objects and concentrated interaction between users, these can both be defined explicitly by users, and can be shown as a simple social-graph, with one object/user in the center, and the closest elements near by.  Direct-relations, which are somewhat like Techmeme, can be created on a broad scale by a user-based system of bundling links to content, based on relationship. Concentrated Interaction is a bit more complex, because it requires an analysis of interaction, but presents an interesting system, helps reach the range of 1.

Note: If you treat Users like data-objects, which they are in a database, you can apply meta-data, to make the concentrated interaction, more specific by what topics the user is most familiar.

So I’ve discussed 5 ways in varying levels of implementation to reduce the range of relevancy.

The use of tagging to create a quick reduction in the range of relevant data.
User selection to narrow down what topics the user likes, or aggregate content that the users friends are looking at.
Further narrow it down by what these friends like.
Allow Bundling of content that is directly related.
Analyze the concentrated interaction graph to narrow down trust sources.

I’m sure I’ve lost someone in this antithetical pile, as I had to get this off my head it was driving me crazy, and I’m going to call it the beginning of a new arcling, to be adjusted down the line. So if  you are interested, I’m sure that we can possibly make it a bit clearer by having a discussion.

Just the other day, Facebook, proposed an update to their privacy policy to allow third-parties to have access to your data, some point in the future, and with this comes, yet, another wave of criticism, some. People are jumping all over Facebook, because they feel people will be paranoid that their data is vulnerable, and that their data shouldn’t be given out willie-nillie to just any third-party site that Facebook comes to agreement with. You would think people would be used to this type of position coming from Facebook, by now, this is their fourth or fifth slip up, but still people complain for a few months and then calm down, until it happens again.

Our most personal data in the US, social security numbers, is insecure, especially if you were born after 1988. The numbers can be defined through 2 data points, date & location of birth, and a little brute forcing. So for the younger generation, nothing is private, not even our government provided personal identification. If we aren’t protected in that regard, should we really be worried about those images from last weekend or who our friends are, what our opinions are? I think Eric Schmidt said it best, in an interview where he discussed privacy, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

I know I jumped on Facebook, but they aren’t the only sites that have huge inventories of data on their users, in hopes of adding relevancy, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al. Facebook is the simplest site to jump on because of it’s repeated transgressions in the area. Google has faced it as well, though, when it didn’t take enough discretion in opening up their Gmail users privacy through Buzz. As the web keeps advancing, privacy options are going to be set to off on default, it will be up to the users to change the settings to keep themselves private, this has been called ‘publicy’.

Are you prepared for the next generation, the age of publicy? Are you ready to get dirty mucking around with settings to protect what little privacy, you will have in the future? Will you let everything go, and change how you interact on the web? These are questions that we will all face, but I think I’m prepared to be completely open in my environment when it comes to social matters, they aren’t anything compared to my financial information or my social security number, which can apparently be brute forced by a bot-net of 10,000 machines in ~1.27 seconds.

Update: Tyler Romeo’s latest post, Why I Dislike Facebook & Foursquare, makes a great point in contrast to the opinions I made here, I agree with quite a bit of what he has to say as far as respecting your users and offering secure protocols, to help protect your users. Take your time and go check that post out.

1. Listen First, Speak Later
If you aren’t listening to them, you have no clue where the conversation is going. If you don’t know where the conversation is headed, you don’t have a clue what you should say. You should hold your words back and carefully sculpt them to what is being said, that way you give credence to what the person is saying, even if you don’t agree with them.

2. Be Happy, Be Calm
You should never get upset in a conversation, because you will become short-sighted. If you become short-sighted you end up risking killing the conversation, or even worse destroying the relationship you have with the person. One thing I do, when I do get aggravated, is I pause the conversation. On the internet, I take a stroll through the house, before going back. In real-time interactions, such as over the phone or in person, I ask them to excuse me, to do something important or use the restroom.

3. Be Responsible
With great power, comes great responsibility. In a world that treasures the passing of knowledge, you wield the greatest power of all, your words. You should take try your best in making sure that what you say is accurate, and not offensive. If you do misspeak make sure that you remedy it, which leads to the next point.

4. Apologize Quickly
An apology might not right every wrong, but it shows that you understand you made a mistake. It is not an excuse to try to get people off your back, if you use it this way, you’re not being sincere. To truly apologize, you first have to state that you are sorry, then show proof that you understand why you wrong.

5. Be Accepting
Always be willing to accept someone’s ideas, even those you might not agree with. Being open to new ideas only leads to a more open and intellectually satisfying discussion. Acceptance is the first step in understanding something new.

6. Be Understanding
Once you have accepted external views, your next task is to step into the person’s shoes, as best you can, and attempt to understand what they are saying. Understanding what someone says makes you much more inviting to converse with, even if after understanding you point out where they have erred, which hopefully is reciprocated.

7. Offer Help
If someone is having a problem, that you can possibly help with, offer your assistance. In offering assistance, you have very little to lose, and much to gain, a new best friend, possibly. I’ve been through this cycle many times, and have made some very good friends by helping them when they needed it.

Here are a few bonus  tips for interacting in the physical world.

Smile
The best way to lighten the mood is to smile, you let everyone know that you enjoy their company. A smile is also a very attractive thing that can make you, and your ideas more appealing. This is the same as an apology, however, and if you aren’t sincere it’s not hard to figure it out, though it might take a bit longer with a smile.

Eye Contact
Eye contact is a great way to show that you are engaged with what the person has to say, and that you aren’t just shrugging off what they say. A few tips on eye contact, don’t stare, and occasionally break contact, for 1-2 seconds, to observe your surroundings.

Infrastructure = Hosting & ISP’s

Data Resources = Data

Data Access & Storage Protocols = API’s

Services = Applications that modify the Data through use of API’s to provide a value

Directories = Provide the ability to find what you’re looking for quite rapidly, can be pseudo-static or dynamic.

Each of these different markets can and most likely will be monetized within the coming years, most likely coming from the users themselves. Hosting & ISP’s have already done it. Directories that aren’t fully dynamic can do it with advertising, and even some of the dynamic real-time directories will be able to use the advertising model. The Data & DASP’s will be subsidized, for the most part, by the initial service’s charges, or possibly the service will be subsidized by external developers paying for access to the data, or just the data itself.

The benefits we will see is that our data is more stable, at least in the sense that the company isn’t going to go belly up, services should be better, and there will be more positions, hopefully. We all walked around expecting everything to be free, when we should have been asking how can we help make more services. Maybe the free world was just the accelerant for innovation to get the initial business models developed, promote an open generation, and allow everyone a shot at getting their ideas out there, it’s easier to pick up users, for a simple service, when you’re not charging them after all. The problem that we had with free is that we all became so jaded by it.

Focus on one of these markets and how you can change it. Each one is easily branched into another, you can traverse up or down that list from where you started. Look at Google, they exist in each of these markets. They started with a DASP that collected vast amounts of Data, then used initially used this data to create a Directory Service, along with quite a few other services, one of which is AppEngine which exists to share their infrastructure.

As the web evolves we’ll see these markets split and converge on each other time and time again, we may even see a new general market pop up. Just as an example of the splitting a market look at the services, there are so many sub-markets that exist within it that it would be hard to categorize them. For an example of convergence you just have to look at the various projects being developed to better connect the web, one of the most recent one’s to pop into my radar is Salmon, which is working to pull comments back to the original source and re-disperse them with the source feeds. Time to watch the ebb and flow, and maybe enter one or more of these markets.

Micro-blogging lets you throw the idea out there, but doesn’t allow much room for the idea to evolve, or tracking this evolution.

Blogging in the conventional sense is much too concrete(though I’m doing it right now). I find the preconception of blogging to be you must push out a full thought. Why?

I propose a release quick, release often blogging structure and build arc’s as your story develops, making branching trees using link structures. Let the ideas build over weeks, or months, rather than waiting for one single burst of insight, and fleshing it out on the spot.

I propose using story arcs, along with links to the latest preceding events in the evolution, and trackbacks to the succeeding story events. Though this is possible in the current evolution of blogging systems, it’s complicated. I want an Arcling platform that makes the connection process easy, if not intelligent in managing the tracing of the structure.

Pretty URL’s – Security & Relative Titles

Making the short URL as human-readable as possible is a plus, however, with the shorteners on the market, they are quite hard to get because every user’s URL is an ID that can only be linked to only once by the service. My solution to this is to embed user data within the link, this abstraction reduces actual URL location to 1-3 characters(b62 range, 62 – 238,328), and you can store the User data in between 4-6 characters(b62, 14,776,336 – 56,800,235,584) at the end. This means the minimal length required for a link is 5 and the maximum is 9. The benefits of applying the User encoding is that it provides the ability to parse the users links, along with any meta-data associated with the link, such as a secondary access to the url, via a user specific vanity title, e.g. http://examp.le/URLxUser = http://examp.le/SteveJ/apple and http://examp.le/XbUser = http://examp.le/LarryP/apple. The User encoding also allows the linking system, to be used as a quick account review if there is any suspicion of malware or spyware being sent by a specific source. One requirement of using the User encoding, is that you define the length that the User data takes up and where it is located. I feel that 5 characters(~1 Billion unique id’s) is optimal at this point in time, and that placing this in the very end of the string is slightly simpler to parse, but that’s just user preference. However, at no point can you change either of these choices without destroying the entire system of links that have been spread over the internet, so you must choose wisely before you begin.

Multiple-Links – More Data, Less Space

Allowing users to batch related content, reduces the total length per link to 22/n to 24/n, where n equals # of links. Applying link specification to the API will extend the length, but also make large batches more usable for sharing data, (e.g. http://examp.le/XbUser?link=1,3). Next topic of discussion for this is how to handle statistics, because regular statistics become a bit blurred by having the ability to access multiple links at the same time. The most accurate collection is only the inbound links to the page, outbound is much more complicated, as it is multiple-permutations on exit paths. The best that you can do is calculate clicks for links, and measure selection for the Open All button by counting all active links. One benefit to the multiple link structure is that it encourages users to become link curators, this provides plenty of data for machine learning, as well as providing associations that aren’t easily discernible to machines, such as what the user likes. It also makes the system an active aggregation center for real-time data. An example of a multi-link(Safari 4 has issues and will open windows instead of tabs) http://lnkr.hiphs.com/socialme

Data Storage – Open Access, Uptime, and Redundant Stores

After, stories such as Ma.gnol.ia’s data loss, Cli.gs hacking, and various services shutting their doors, link rot becomes a very big concern. So I’ve looked into various solutions and one that sticks out is based on work by Directeur for use in federated real-time systems, Socnodes, and the Oruboros & Lamaean Hydra problems that he had to solve. His solution to the Oruboros was using Atom Feeds UID’s with service title to allow the systems to check against themselves. The usefulness of the Socnode layout is you can store and update remote databases with your data, creating a remote redundant store, but also n-ary accessible domains. Assuming you use separate data storage sites, DNS’s, and build otherwise independent systems that operate with the same data in parallel.

There will be a point that URL’s aren’t going to be nearly as important and I see this as a step to reaching it. These steps toward ease of access, safely securing the data, through redundancy, encoding and embedded data, and review systems, and the ability to collect related and relevant data are steps in the right direction.