Back in the old days – or the ’90s as some call them – we utilized the Internet as an information resource. What’s that phone number, where is that address, where can I buy that product – you had concrete questions and were no longer required to speak to a human to get answers. Sure, there were bulletin boards and Usenet forums for discussion but they primarily involved coding arguments and game walkthroughs. The Internet wasn’t truly upended into a community, and all that that entails, until just a couple of years ago. It was then that the inundation of bloggers collided with social networking and lifestreaming to produce a perfect storm of content. (And when I say lifestreaming, I mean the trend of putting as many pieces of our life online as possible – books we’re reading, music we like, etc.) We’ve now backed ourselves into a corner online, raging against the indundation of content even as we scroll through our fifth page of FriendFeed updates. We recommend well-written articles about navigating through the noise, right after sharing 25 items in Google Reader.

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.

Customer service. It’s a phrase that likely conjures up visions of… well, I’m not sure it conjures up anything for most people these days. It’s a dying philosophy in modern times, as we become more insular and removed from our communities. What’s the point of going the extra mile for someone when you’ll likely never come in contact with them again? Indeed, the only instances of excellent customer service that come to my mind are of stores and companies at which I’m a “regular.”

The concept is gaining more traction in blog circles lately, as companies attempt to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to better serve their customers. Sarah Perez recently focused on Twitter as a customer service tool on ReadWriteWeb and Cyndy Aleo-Carreira posted about some personal experiences, good and bad, with several companies. I myself have noticed a couple of new Twitter followers immediately following sign-ups in new betas recently. One amusing incident involved me tweeting “What the hell is Mergelab and what am I supposed to do with it?” only to receive a direct reply from the CEO 10 minutes later. Lesson: excising profanity will usually result in nicer-sounding tweets.

What inspired this post though, was a startup that threw me for a loop yesterday. A bit of background: I’m in dire need of a meeting scheduler, software that will set up conference calls and meetings for me. The amount of time I spend each day in back-and-forth emails is ridiculous. I tried TimeBridge and found it clunky and hard to navigate. I haven’t received an invite to the beta of TimeDriver, so can’t speak to that app’s functionality. There are a couple of others I have in the queue to try and yesterday, I signed up for Jiffle. I’m not sure what I think of the product yet, but I can tell you that I’m willing to stick with it longer solely because of its customer service.

About an hour after I signed up and downloaded Jiffle, I received a phone call from the company’s client service manager, Cicely Doerr. She wanted to know how my install had gone and if I had any questions on using the software. I admit I was initially an egoist, assuming she Googled me, saw I was an emerging tech analyst and therefore merited hand-holding. But no, it turns out she calls everyone who downloads the software. This is obviously not a sustainable practice, as the larger a service’s user base becomes, the more reps they’ll need to employ for follow-up. And I don’t necessarily want a personal phone call from each and every product I try out. But at this particular moment in time, it was enough to make Jiffle stand out among the mass of companies I look at every day.

This all brought to mind an IM conversation I had with Chris the other day. A colleague pointed her to a study from a Big 10 University that found that 0% of business customers – in a survey done for a large technology provider – turn to blogs as an information source. Their most trusted source? Sales reps. That’s got to smart a bit in the Web 2.0 world. It got us talking about the supreme importance of customers and how they’ve been overshadowed in emerging tech. Many startups view funding as the endpoint, racing to secure coverage on blogs read by VCs – and apparently no one else. It’s the meme we return to over and over on The Guidewire: remember the masses. Funding is integral, to be sure, but once you’ve secured it, apply the same drive and tenacity to securing customers and, more importantly, keeping them happy. Will Jiffle eventually become my go-to app for scheduling? It’s too early to tell. But now that I know the company is invested in my satisfaction, I’m much more willing to look past initial snags or setbacks.

Sometimes a phrase just leaps out at you. I was reading a thought-provoking piece on ReadWriteWeb, about whether technology complicates or simplifies our lives, and was struck by the phrase, “the encumbrance of over-choice.” It comes from Richard Szafranski, Partner at Toffler Associates, and I hope he’ll forgive me for stealing it for this post’s title. Szafranski stated it as he participated in an Economist/Oxford 2.0 debate over the following premise: if the promise of technology is to simplify our lives, it is failing. The public isn’t with him on this at the moment, with 64% of voters siding with simplification. The phrase struck a chord with me, though, as it nails precisely what I’ve been trying to put a finger on for several weeks. Where does my social graph end?

Until a couple of months ago, I had admittedly only dipped a toe into the morass of social innovations now available. Screening companies for DEMO and providing analysis to The Guidewire Report monopolizes my time and I tended to try out a service for a week or two, only to leave my profile languishing afterward. But as I wade deeper into emerging tech and blogging – and present myself as an expert on startups – I’d be remiss not to immerse myself fully into key services. So I’ve dove headfirst into FriendFeed and Twitter, Twine and PlaxoPulse, Persai and YouNoodle, Facebook and LinkedIn, and some 10-15 others I won’t assault you with. The problem isn’t that these services are faulty. It’s the exact opposite – I’m loving them. They’re delivering so well on their promises that I continually add them as must-visit sites. The fabulous little Firefox add-on Morning Coffee now opens up 10 tabs every morning, each with links to read, comments to make and interesting tidbits to submit to my network. To keep things as simple as possible, I’ve struck my banking and financial sites from the Morning Coffee list and now wonder from afar if my e-bills are up to date. (On second thought, this could come in handy should my money start tanking; I’ll just blame my social graph.)

Everyone’s been raving about FriendFeed in recent weeks and I couldn’t agree more. I only just joined Persai and am hugely impressed with its learning capabilities. Plaxo Pulse may lose the war to FriendFeed but they’ve designed a great interface. And Twine – well, I can’t talk about Twine until next week but it’s good stuff. It now appears though that we need a bigger umbrella technology, something to scale the firehose back down to a drip but still retain the sophistication of the current innovations.

The opposing side of the Economist debate was John Maeda, president-elect of the Rhode Island School of Design. His view is that, seeing as how all of these technologies – especially the ones I mention above – are in their infancy, it would be foolish to write them off as complicating life until they’ve reached maturity. It’s a strong point and one of which I must continually remind myself. True early adopters must be willing to endure complication in order to one day reach simplification. So maybe my question shouldn’t be, “where does the social graph end?” but “where is it going to take me?”

Josh Catone’s piece, Visualizing Social Media Fatigue, on ReadWriteWeb added fuel to a fire I’ve been stoking for some time now. Problem is, I’m too tired to write about it. Just looking at the map he references makes me want to take a nap.

It’s no stunning revelation of course; we’ve all been begging for relief from information overload for some time now. (I remember referring to the social explosion last year as a “massively multi-headed monster.”) But the tools being created to alleviate the problem aren’t really solving it – and are creating problems of their own. I suppose it’s an inevitable result when a market struggles with something, particularly in technology: a certain number of fits and starts are necessary on the way to a seamless solution.

In recent weeks I’ve found myself signing up for several profile aggregators, or life streams as some call them, in the vain hope that one will solve all my social graph headaches. It’s not working. Instead of logging on to multiple social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr, I now find myself logging on to multiple aggregator sites like Plaxo Pulse, Friendfeed and PageOnce. Each offers different ways of aggregating all manner of sites, and each has its own friend list. The constant input of status updates, blog posts and profile changes from all my friends on each different service is sometimes interesting but most often maddening. And don’t get me started on Twitter.

I love the social Web. I love the status updates on Facebook and the business networking on LinkedIn and the mountains of feeds that inform me on Google Reader. But I’m not the norm. I spend all day online and get paid to wade around in the social graph. I have an abundance of time to devote to corralling this information. The rest of the world does not. My suburban mom friends can barely make time for a Scrabulous game on Facebook. If we truly want to proliferate a social Web among the masses, we absolutely must make it simpler. Everyday consumers won’t have the time or patience to plant – and keep track of – their graph on multiple sites.

So enough with the whining, what’s a tech sector to do? I don’t think these companies are headed in the wrong direction, necessarily. The basic idea is sound; it’s the execution that is lacking. Broad initiatives like data portability are intriguing but still in the early stages and seemingly a long way from real-world validation.

While we want to be careful about putting too much power in the hands of one company, I think the safe bet for the moment is to construct our social graphs around one dedicated, already existing site. The aggregator services need to give us the tools to plug in to preferred networks rather than out. Plaxo Pulse has a promising interface – why not enable it to supplement my Facebook news feed? Or if you spend more time on MySpace, plug your Friendfeed in there. I’m not just talking about tiny app boxes on your profile page either; I added the LinkedIn app to Facebook months ago and haven’t viewed it since.

We’re now faced with two choices: re-direct feed streams into one existing service until we figure out data portability or, god help us, aggregate the aggregators. At some point, we’re going to aggregate ourselves right into absurdity.

I’ve been sitting for awhile on an excellent post Alex Iskold wrote for ReadWriteWeb on the semantic Web. He raises good questions about semantics’ viability in the mass consumer market and what it will take to get it there. However that application ultimately looks, it must, in Alex’s words, “ignite imagination and capture people’s hearts and minds.” Perfect characterization – one I wish I’d come up with.

I hadn’t been able to put my finger on exactly why the post gave me pause. Then this morning it hit me: I don’t know what the semantic Web is. Further, I don’t think any of us do.

Now before you press that “Flame” button (I’m assuming all new keyboards come equipped with one these days), let me explain myself. Technically, of course I can define semantics. The semantic Web is a smarter Web. It is one that understands the meaning behind data and makes salient and usable connections between previously flat entities. But translating that into a workable application is an entirely different matter. I agree with Alex’s assertion that the semantic Web won’t truly be defined until its killer app hits. But I think we are a long way off from even approaching the neighborhood of a killer app. Theorizing about in which sector it will hit is akin to throwing darts into the ocean. (Choose your favorite metaphor of futility there.)

I’ve talked to a large number of companies utilizing semantics and they are all over the map, from innovative search engines to deep databases to talking personal assistants. Each time I get on the phone with a company, I hope it will be *the* answer, the semantics application that will clear up the whole muddied mess and crystallize the sector. It hasn’t happened yet and, if anything, each conversation adds another layer to an already deep issue.

Awhile back, I had a fascinating conversation with Larry Lefkowitz at CyCorp, a renowned company in artificial intelligence that has been working on a self-learning computing system for close to 20 years. The CyCorp site is decidedly old-school and you won’t find its execs doing interviews with 60 Minutes. But, as I wrote at the time for The Guidewire Report, the work CyCorp is doing is among the most important in technology today. As Larry pointed out to me, the truism of AI, and subsequently semantics, is that when it truly works, you won’t notice it. Perhaps that’s the irony of this ongoing discussion among pundits. No matter how many theories we have as to where it’s coming from and where it’s going, the ultimate solution will likely evolve quietly, organically, behind the scenes of a seemingly run-of-the-mill software app. We’ll raise our heads from our keyboards one day and find that the words we’re typing have taken on a life of their own.

Now I’ve scared myself a little bit. My point is that perhaps we don’t have to parse every aspect of technology in order to bring meaning and understanding to it. Perhaps there are parts of our technological universe that need, even demand, to be free-flowing and unstructured before they can coalesce into a game-changing proposition. Maybe – just maybe – it’s okay that we don’t comprehend the implications of this sector fully. To a world of technologists accustomed to breaking down every problem in order to solve it, that may seem impossible. But I’m willing to give it a try.