The theory behind The Stream is that the next phase of the Internet lies in “the collective movement that is taking place across” sites and services. That the ideas and conversations occurring on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and the like are a new layer on top of the existing Web. As Nova puts it:

The stream is our collective mind, what the Web is thinking and doing right now… a world of even shorter attention spans, online viral sensations, instant fame, sudden trends, and intense volatility. It is also a world of extremely short-term conversations and thinking.

His concluding question is, of course, how users are supposed to cope with the stream. And that’s where I’d like to step in. I’m all for the idea of a dynamic stream. But it’s time the rest of my online tools caught up.

The camel’s back broke for me last week as I was going through my RSS feeds. Keeping up with individual items has been a thorn in my side for months now. I can never manage to check them daily and inevitably end up reading only the first few dozen, then deleting the rest. So I was already cranky when I came across an item touting the latest social profile aggregator (I honestly can’t remember the name now). I almost threw my laptop out the window. I have no desire to 1) aggregate everything into one place or 2) visit a Web site to do this. That’s when the light bulb came on: I no longer want to visit Web sites. I want pertinent and relevant information delivered to me on a desktop app and on my Facebook feed. I just don’t have the time or inclination to click around anymore.

I’m not the only one in this mood. Webgiftr, a reminder/recommendation service for gift giving, recently announced that it is shutting down its Web service and migrating all user data to Facebook.  The company clearly saw dwindling site visits combined with increased Facebook activity and did the math. One of our Innovate!Europe finalists, Mixin, is integrating event information into the Facebook feed, making it easier to determine where your friends will be this weekend. This shows foresight on their part and I hope other services begin to follow suit.

I agree wholeheartedly that the stream is a smart – and potentially lucrative – concept on which to place your business bets. The trick now will be two-fold: integrating it into the necessary, high-traffic sites and applications and homing in on the content streams that will matter most to consumers. FriendFeed hits closest to the mark currently; it’s key problems are an unpopular interface, difficulty integrating real-world friends, and too much noise. But if it can face down those challenges, it seems to me a relatively seamless way to insert the stream into everyday consumers’ lives.

In short, I love the idea of The Stream. It’s time to think about content, and our relationship to it, differently. The age of the frequently updated Web site is over. Thinking about content, in all its forms, as an ever-shifting overlay to our time online should be our key focus in the months ahead.

Rob’s post, though, takes it one step further to just where I wanted to go. The tech world has at its fingertips a ready-made, gargantuan network of users who have dipped their toe into the social media universe and are primed for more – Facebook. Tech insiders regularly deride Facebook and, at times on Twitter and FriendFeed, there seems to be a game of who can hate Facebook more. We could certainly spend an entire post talking about Facebook’s flaws. But the fact remains that the people who are on it are, for the most part, not involved in the blogosphere. Those are precisely the people entrepreneurs need to reach and, for the moment, they’re lying fallow, playing Scrabble and throwing things at each other.

Just in my little world, Facebook has exploded in the past few months, with seemingly every college acquaintance joining up. In general, their activities are limited to posting pictures, playing games and sending messages. And that, from the entrepreneur’s point of view, is a waste of one hell of a network. No company has nailed this yet – found the chink through which to pull people into truly immersive technologies. Take FriendFeed, for example. My Facebook news feed is primarily populated with FriendFeed updates and a few of my non-tech friends have noticed. But their initial forays into the FriendFeed site itself have proven short lived. There’s too much of a behavior change required to really get the value of FriendFeed. In addition, it can be lonely for a first-timer; you post a link and anxiously wait for comments that don’t come because you have few followers.

In fact, that is the primary hurdle for most social technologies – users don’t get the value without a large circle of connections and you don’t gain connections without a deep level of involvement. That kind of chicken/egg problem will be the death of the social Web. The answer is to deliver these immersive technologies to networks that already exist. Facebook attempted this in part with the comment feature added to its news feed. It took a bit for it to catch on but is now thriving and creating real conversations on once flat pages. There is much more on that page to plumb, though. Smart entrepreneurs who’ll need to watch every dollar in the coming months will recognize that it’s much easier to build on top of an existing social graph than attempt to build your own. Let’s hope they realize it before we lose consumers’ interest.

The logical next step in this technological journey is to therefore prune, to make our time online more meaningful and relevent, no matter how small the nugget of information. Whether I’m setting out to qualify findings in a drug discovery experiment or wondering when Amy Winehouse was last arrested, I want the most reliable, relevant answer in the shortest amount of time. The problem is no longer whether the information is out there but rather how we can get to it quickly and accurately.

It’s against this background that I’m seeing a gradual evolution of the semantic search market. What was once viewed as a sector attempting to “kill” Google has become something different in recent months. It turns out that what Google does is 1) pretty hard to do well and 2) pretty sufficient for most people. Creating an all-purpose search engine that answers any query in any form and delivers a more targeted result will take time to get right. I don’t think we’re going to wake up one day to find GoogleKiller.com suddenly filling all our search needs.

Several companies I’ve met with lately have innovative takes on making the Web more meaningful for users. But I’ve noticed that my reaction has gone from, “Wow, I’ve never seen that before” to “Oh, that’s an interesting take on what so-and-so is doing.” In other words, I believe smarter search and discovery have reached a new stage in their evolution. The problem has been well defined and the angles from which it can be approached have been established (at least for the foreseeable future.) It’s now time to focus on the niggling details: how to identify and amass relevant information, present it to users in an easily consumable yet rich visual format, and, perhaps most importantly, establish a user base that will consistently turn to your product as a valued information resource.

I’ve written previously about companies that I keep a close eye on in the smarter search space. These products, along with a couple of new entrants, bear repeating, as they’re molding a new shape for the Internet.

Powerset raised the bar for UI with its Wikipedia search engine, and, perhaps more importantly, sent a tacit message to the tech world that a smarter search engine isn’t going to develop overnight. Regular readers of The Guidewire know I won’t shutup about Silobreaker, a current affairs search engine that really shines in visualization and content extraction. Its entity maps are among the best I’ve seen, providing instant insight into relevant connections between people, places and things. Evri is a newer entrant in the field, with a product that combines the visual maps of Silobreaker with the subject and verb extraction of Powerset to give users a deeper dive into news articles. Semantinet brings to mind Yoono‘s discovery feature, but on steroids, recognizing entities on the page you’re viewing and bringing in related info from other sites. It makes discovery more intriguing by adding a personal layer, i.e., while viewing a page about Italy, receiving notification that a Facebook friend just added photos from Italy. True Knowledge is Freebase meets Cyc with natural language search thrown in for good measure.

As I was writing this post, a couple of good articles popped up that are worth reading. ReadWriteWeb took a broad look at trends it believes will shake up search in the near future. And Epicenter’s Betsy Schiffman had an interesting take on Google’s dominance of the market. I have to respectfully disagree with Chris Sherman of Search Engine Land, who said in Schiffman’s piece:

“I certainly think the game’s over in terms of building a world-class search engine. It’s too expensive — Google and others are literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars, in terms of research, development and infrastructure. Start-ups don’t have access to those sorts of resources.”

I see his point about cost but think we’re far from declaring game over. Though GoogleKiller.com may not appear any time soon, the smaller engines are working other avenues to build adoption and user base. The game has changed from pouring millions into a destination site to instead channeling resources into multiple iterations of a product to gain traction. Powerset, for example, is testing a new Facebook app that finally brings capable search into the social network, in addition to its just-announced iPhone app, which generated 46% of its total traffic yesterday.

Sherman is right in one aspect: with such a complex problem and so many angles from which to attack, going it alone as a destination engine makes for a tougher, longer and more expensive fight. Smart companies are now shifting focus, integrating their algorithms into existing communities that are sorely in need of sophisticated search. Look for this integration and coalescing to continue on multiple levels in the next year. It will no longer be about killing Google but about making search, discovery and recommenation a more seamless and intuitive part of our existing online lives.

The UI is what initially piqued my excitement for Yoono. It’s simply the best I’ve seen. Simple-to-navigate widgets sit in an inconspicuous sidebar that opens only when you need it, small pop-up windows give informative snapshots of contacts and updates, all clicks open to a new tab, and photos and videos temporarily overlay the current Web page in a slick little feature I hadn’t seen before Yoono. The company has obviously put a large amount of effort and focus into design and it’s welcomed. At this stage of the social Web, it’s the type of UI we should start expecting from every product.

I have to be honest, though, and say that my enthusiasm waned slightly after a few days of putting Yoono through its paces. The app can drain a lot of memory and when you’re dealing with Vista, you need every little bit. (Macolytes, I don’t want to hear it.) I’ve also found myself drifting back to the FriendFeed page to read updates; the Yoono window just requires too much scrolling.

When I brought up that last complaint to Erica Lee, Yoono’s PR rep, she made a good point: Yoono isn’t intent on taking you away from regularly visited sites. The service instead wants to give you a one-stop dashboard, a more informative, simpler place from which to navigate. Perhaps then, the lifestream in the sidebar could be consolidated more, giving aggregated shots of FriendFeed activity, for instance. An aggregation of the aggregators, if you will. Stop me before I aggregate again.

My nits with Yoono, though, are just that – nits. Because I’m so impressed with what they’re attempting and the product they’ve designed, I’m even more demanding of perfection from it. Yoono is one step away from being a must-have product on my social Web list. With what I’ve seen of the team’s focus, responsiveness and overall aggregation philosophy, I imagine they’ll leap past my expectations rather quickly.

**We’ve been given 200 Yoono invite codes for interested Guidewire readers. Click here before they disappear.**

It was then that the light bulb went off. FriendFeed is the gateway to Web 2.0 for mass consumers. It’s incredibly easy to jump into, easy to navigate and easy to participate; not many people have a hard time figuring out what the “comment” button means. It’s also the rarest of services, in which it doesn’t take long to get the draw. Spend two hours in there and you’re hooked. There are a couple of ways FriendFeed could roll out to consumers. Introduce FriendFeed as a way to share and discuss articles with your friends and find the good stuff from people you trust. Once consumers dip their toes in, have a taste of the recommended friends feature and see the tangential relationships that form, they’ll start exploring the other applications that pop up. “What’s this Last.fm service? What are these little 140-character sentences I keep seeing? Who the hell is Robert Scoble?” You get the idea. Honestly, it’s like a gateway drug. Draw them in with something harmless and easy to understand, then watch them drift toward the hard stuff. I’ll stop that analogy there before it goes any further.

Another option would be to offer first-timers a bundled package of services from which to start. If you’re a media buff, here’s YouTube, Netflix, Last.fm, and Pandora to get you started. Or even bundled packages of friends – FriendFeed old-timers that wouldn’t mind being followed by strangers. Want a tech infusion? Here’s Robert Scoble and Mark Hopkins. Looking for music lovers? Try Jonathan Coulton and Fred Wilson. I know my friend Shellee trolled the Everyone tab to find fellow politicos; wouldn’t it have been great to offer her a ready-made feed?

The question of how to share general emerging tech knowledge with a larger audience needs more discussion and thought. It’s something those of us on the inside need to be continually pondering. But perhaps a good first step lies in sharing easy-to-grasp products that can have a positive effect on people’s lives, without submersing them in the intricacies of one hundred different services.

I had one of those conversations this morning with my friend Polly, who is marginally tech-savvy, mainly because she’s too busy raising three boys to be otherwise. We talked about several tech-related issues, some of which I’ll post about in the coming days. But perhaps the most interesting talk concerned Facebook, in which she bemoaned the hesitance of some of our friends to join the site. She’s surprised to find that a few of her friends won’t consider a Facebook profile; that there was even a level of disgust at the idea. We threw around a couple of theories but I suspect the answer is pretty simple: ego. There is an air of ego – mistaken in my opinion – around Facebook and social networking in general. From the point of view of my generation and older, Web 2.0 is about ego: telling people what you’re doing at the moment, referring to articles you’re reading, posting pictures of yourself and the parties you go to – all actions that are second-nature to younger generations but anathema to anyone born before 1973 (or so).

Here’s my point: these services we’re building and testing and funding – where are they headed? For what mass audience are they intended? Take FriendFeed. I love it, you love it, we’re all (mostly) in agreement that they’ve built a nifty little service for those of us inside baseball. But how am I supposed to explain it to someone who’s never heard of an RSS reader? Someone who exclaimed, “Wow, you can do that?” when I described Google Reader to her? She wants to know about FriendFeed but I don’t even know where to begin. “Well, first you create an account at six or seven different services that you’ve also never heard of…”

I know I harp on this often but we desperately need to take all this fantastic innovation and share it with the outside world. The fact that many people think Facebook to be an ego trip (and equate it with the less-mature MySpace) is our fault. The fact that RSS still hasn’t made it to the mainstream is our fault. We’re the insiders with a wealth of knowledge and fulfilling tech experiences to share. The point of evangelizing is to win new converts, not to continue preaching to the already converted. Isn’t that the definition of insanity – doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result?

I’m not entirely sure who I’m directing this rant towards. Perhaps it’s to everyone who has forgotten the larger audience – bloggers, pundits, marketing strategists, investors and entrepreneurs alike. We need to broaden our reach, talk to everyday consumers about their technology uses, likes, and dislikes. Think past the TechCrunch reviews while building a product and plan for its uses in the real world.

While there is certainly a stage at which a product needs to be honed first within the industry, we should recognize the point at which it’s time to take it to the masses. Time to take the acronyms off and present it to consumers in a manner they can understand. Time to build products that will extend beyond our secluded little world. Time, it seems, to stop staring at our navels.

**Update: Just after I posted this entry, I came across this on LaughingSquid. A series of short videos featuring people describing Twitter, it’s a perfect illustration of the disconnect between technology insiders and mass consumers. Evan Williams is a brilliant guy who built two fantastic products – but he needs to learn friendlier language that will appeal to mass consumers. Alex North’s description wins my vote – a real-world case for using Twitter.