Yesterday I read about Twine at Read/Write/Web and was giddy with excitement.  For so long I have been waiting for a semantic based wiki solution that we can use to organize, mash and store all the data/knowledge we gather from our subscribers, into a beautiful set of regular reports and real-time dashboards that would help our subscriber companies explore their own companies from an IT perspective - as deeply as they would like.

We are currently accomplishing this using Jotspot.  We were a very early adopter of Jotspot and saw great potential - but with limited semantic like tools within JotSpot, we ended up with little ability to report from the data we were putting in.  We have been regularly making our sacrifices for the JotSpot/Google gods and have not lost faith - but our eye has started to wander.

When I first saw Freebase, I thought it was the answer to our data organizing needs.  How easy to use, how elegant it was...  But the more I learned about Freebase, the more it seemed that they were out to start a war with Wikipedia for the source of all knowledge.  Wikipedia's fanatical community has kept it difficult to use and this may give Freebase a chance, time will tell.  But one thing seems clear - Metaweb has no time to build business tools while chasing this lofty goal.   So I was left to continue with my sacrifices and prayers to GoogleJot to relaunch JotSpot as the ultimate semantic tool.

I read about Twine and read the Wired article about them and once again my hopes are lifted.  Whether this is the answer to our prayers is yet to be seen.  While there are hints that they want to build a business friendly tool (privacy, AD integration, etc) - we'll see how they unravel.

All this metathinking has me wondering what the UI options for our mythical knowledge tool might be.

I wonder if we start with an object and set the type as 'Sinu Subscriber Business Solution' and then add 'hosted in-house' as an additional type/tag - will the UI automatically add a new column option when displaying this object that would summarize the backup health for the object based on data we are collecting from the backup solution in place.   This would be a beautiful thing.

In the meantime,  I am very happy the wiki is evolving.  If you want to understand what it is that is getting all of is Semantic Web groupies excited - watch Tim Berners-Lee explain it.

This past week, I took a vacation.  It is the first vacation in a very long time and felt kind of strange being disconnected that long.  But it was great to know that the Sinu team kept things running smoothly.

I was on a cruise and for most of the time had no data service on my Treo 700W, the only device I brought with me.  I used the ship's computer center once which I assume is connected via satellite but paying per hour and sitting in a computer lab setting is not that conducive to getting things done.  So all I really did was shoot off short replies to a few emails and just browsed the rest.

As I walked away from the ship computer after about 40 minutes, I was thinking that those 40 minutes would have been enough to sync up all my email on even the slowest of connections and at that moment I wished I had brought a laptop.  Well since I hate carrying a laptop - I actually wished for a fictional device like the new Palm Folio but one that ran Outlook.   I could have sat anywhere and really worked on some stuff without worrying about 'being connected'.  A lesson I learned a long time ago is that almost live is just as good and 95% cheaper.  I could have gotten a lot of communication done by just syncing up every day or two when I was docked on an island or by stopping by the wifi center for a few minutes.

So as I sat back with yet another of the one too many Arnold Palmers I had onboard I began to think how offline apps are the only answer and what a powerful position Adobe is in right now with one of the first technologies that allow an online apps to go offline and sync - Apollo (or whatever they call it now).  I guess Google through its heavy influence on Mozilla is also working to solve this problem but my sense is that Flash/Apollo has a huge head start and the Mozilla guys are just not good at this creative stuff.

While looking for specialized hosted solutions for our clients, I came upon FreshBooks. This is a small focused application designed for time tracking and invocing. They do one thing and do it well. Their pricing model is superb and simple (while still allowing customization for the control-freak set). They even have a usable free version very suitable for the boutique consultant that has two or three clients they regulary invoice on a time basis.

All said, great company, and a great product. If you need something like it, use it.

Of course, since this is not a paid ad, I will go into what this really is about:

The "Web 2.0" (gosh, I really dislike that term... Then again I still call AJAX... DHTML! ;) was a great movement towards solution development. It broke the focus on total solutions that tried to be everything to everybody and ended up being barely useful for barely anyone.

But an inherent problem of all of these solutions is the lack of interoperability. They solved the problem of generalist focus on specialized needs, but completely forgot that no matter how specialized, people never use a single tool for their productivity: no solution is an island.

For example, we use a tool called Wufoo for some of our customer input needs.

It is very easy to setup, integrates well into the Squarespace CRM we use for this website, and delivers real value to our company. However, it only sends emails and doesn't even have an ecosystem around it to turn the inputed data into usable form.  This isolation is frustating: a great solution becomes less attractive just because it doesn't interoperate easily.

Some companies are approaching this problem creatively:

For example Salesforce.com and Google both strive to develop ecosystems around their platforms, seeing themselves as data repository and interface providers to a whole range of development efforts. These are great ways to approach this inherent problem, and are a step in the right direction.

 However, they also have their own set of inherent issues, which I will dicuss at a later date...

 Carlos R. - Lead Developer