Our earlier post about the Semantic vs. Synaptic Web has raised some questions about the users of this new web trend. Why do we think it will be about the users and no more about the computers talking between each other.

Image via Wikipedia

We can reference a bit with Ghost in The Shell. There is a network in which everyone is connected, our bodies are cyborg and only our brain and thoughts are real and even those can be manipulated if you know how.

How would we fit into the picture at our current age and development of web. We can look at it that we currently have this giant network of data, information and everything. The data is being processed, manipulated and given new meaning each second through mostly open API that people are giving out.

Here we then come to our brains and us as users. We alone read the patterns and connections that start to establish around the things. We give the best feedback to developers. Pushing how we use the application, trying to make it as much human as we can, but the machine can not learn so fast, there is still time to put in and connection that we must establish.

The synaptic web is focusing just on that, that we establish the necessary connection through user interactivity instead of just reading and parsing the text material data and produce extracts, tags and other meta data around things. The user should show us their patterns of use. We are each an individual, using the same applications in different ways.

Image via Wikipedia

So tracking the users behavior and incorporating the connections in the application is the thing that Synaptic Web in our opinion will do. As Semantic Web was just gathering the data and extracting meanings, upgrading the web to a machine learning stage.

The Synaptic Web will hopefully bring the next step, connecting the machines to users and helping users interact with them in a simple way. All users really want is to get the important information for them first, without having to distinguish and apply their own patterns daily as we do currently.

Synaptic Web is the brain-computer interface of the web.

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Word on the street has it that semantic has become a curseword and people should avoid using it at all cost, especially in relation to any sort of internet business or technology.

Hearing about this led me to wondering about why and how it was that the semantic web failed us so badly that even just using the word is bad for business. The first step on my adventure was figuring out what the semantic web promised us, because you can’t see where things went wrong if you don’t know what a movement tried to produce.

After a lot of googling and searching my memory for what people have said/promised over the years this is the best description I could find:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Far as I can understand this means that the web will be organised in such a fashion machines could understand it perfectly and use it as some sort of huge collective brain – a bit like the Borg perhaps. This would indeed be a wonderful future, machines talking to machines, data flowing to and fro with perfect understanding of why, streamlined transactions optimised to perfection through better understanding of their environment …

The big flaw here is: machines talking to machines.

It would be difficult to say how exactly somebody came up with a concept of the internets that so deeply misses the whole point of why the internet is as popular as it is. Perhaps the reason is that the quote comes from 1999 when the web was a wholly different beast, but why then, pray tell, did entrepreneurs latch onto this idea only around 2005 when not much was different than today? If you’re looking for those answers, I’m not the man to ask, but I can tell you what the internet is about and how the synaptic web helps there.

The internet is people talking to people

When it comes to the internet it’s all about being social, about following your friends and having conversations. Nobody cares anymore about finding data, that’s all on wikipedia, at worst a google search away, nobody cares anymore about computers talking to computers. In fact I’d wager a nice lump of money that most user’s eyes would glaze over when you started talking about all of that.

This is where I believe the semantic web has failed us, the users, and investors and pretty much anyone who wanted to do anything serious with it. Semantics are a good background protocol, a lovely standard for obsessive webdevs to follow, an amazingly good technology … but in and of itself without a purpose.

The only people that needed the semantic web were [are] developers, there is no product to be found therein, Zemanta‘s tool is probably the closest one can come to a semantic product and even that probably has far more magic in everything but semantics.

We need computers that understand people and this is something you, of course, need semantics for. It’s also something that produces immediate value to the only person that really matters – The User.

tl;dr version: The Synaptic Web will not fail us because it focuses on users.

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Just as the foundation of modern RISC computers was a set of basic design and performance requirements put forth in the mid 1970′s, so too there are a few basic requirements for a synaptic web application.

Paraphrased and somewhat shortened from synapticweb.org they are:

• They connect two or more categories of things together
• They create or derive new/novel meaning or utility from implicit connections
• The connections they enable adjust in real or near-real time to changes
• They bias towards implicit connections driven by user behaviour
• They use the web as the platform
• They apply a variety of inputs to extend existing applications
• They become stronger through network effects
• They are defined by usership and information flows and are untethered from any destination site
• One of their primary inputs and/or outputs is the stream

Some of these requirements are arguably almost trivial to implement. Most web developers already know how to use the web as the platform with various API‘s and many of the most popular applications already base almost their entire ecosystem on extensions and pluggable widgets.

However there are some very hard nuts to crack in there. Namely the two biggest problems are creating a rating algorithm, because all connections need ratings/weights lest they are useless, that would comply and creating connections between several different kinds of things.

The Connections Problem

ON the face of it, creating connections between completely different and practically unrelated concepts is nearly impossible. How would you, for example, form connections between a platypus and a frog?

A human can [almost] easily make the connection, after all, a human came up with it. The association is quite simply that they both live mostly in water, but aren’t fish.

But how could a computer come up with such a leap of logic? It can’t do this with machine learning, simply isn’t possible by any means we know today and there is no set of organised data large enough to figure out intricate connections like that. Perhaps if you had the whole of wikipedia processed and a few years of supercomputer time … then perhaps, perhaps you could crack it.

Did you notice it? The answer was right there, in those two paragraphs.

No? Well let me help you out, the answer is to use humans to make the connections. This might not work for every application out there, but humans in general are very good at making illogical and non-obvious connections. The real kicker? These are the connections that really matter to us. We don’t, personally, care that water on Phobos implies life. We care that our neighbour’s cat reminds us of Mr. Fluffy we had as a child.

The Rating Problem

Because all connections and pretty much anything about information is rather useless, or only marginally useful, without some sort of weights acting on the whole mishmash of technologies, we soon clash with the toughest nut to crack with all of the Synaptic Web.

Eric Schmidt has said that the biggest problem of this age is discovering a link rating algorithm that works with a real-time information stream. The answer, in my opinion, is a synaptic application.

Right now most ratings are considered globally, are created very explicitly, and barely tell us anything about what they’re trying to rate. Google Reader suggests things as very very awesome even when they were “liked” by people I’ve never heard of. TweetMeme promotes stuff every-fucking-body in the world has retweeted, but there is nothing even remotely considering whether I‘m going to like it.

The synaptic web model predicts a future where applications understand my actions (some of this is implicitly creating connections between things) and dynamically adjust their ratings of content accordingly. One of my biggest pet peeves, for example, is that last.fm says my favouritest band in the world is something I haven’t listened to in almost a year. Wtf?

Creating such algorithms is very problematic though. The only real way of even scratching the surface of this problem is by applying a lot of meta-heuristics, like simulated annealing, and doing a lot of reinforcement machine learning – something that isn’t as perfectly researched and understood as supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning algorithms – to the problem of weighing connections and things in databases.

And even after you’ve created a good reinforcement learning environment with a lot of simulated annealing going on, you’re still left wondering how to even rate user action. Sometimes clicking a link is good because the person liked what they were suggested, at other times they opened and shared it just so they could warn their friends not to bother with this crap.

Final Summation

In short, creating a real synaptic application is hard and those that do make one are bloody amazing guys.

Image via Wikipedia

The Synaptic Web has been around for a while now, the nearly two months are an age in internet terms, but it hasn’t been known for as long as the semantic web and the real-time web. They’ve been around for eons upon eons and are thus far better understood.

This is why we don’t know much about what the Synaptic Web is supposed to be, why I don’t know much about it, Khris Loux might, Eric Blantz perhaps, Chris Saad maybe, they coined the term after all, came up with the concept even. But outside of creating a lovely article on the subject over at synapticweb.org there hasn’t been much news on the matter.

However this doesn’t stop us from being among the first implementors of synaptic algorithms. Don’t think we just plunged into this head-first after hearing the buzzword though, we’ve been at it for a while now. Hunting for an elusive algorithm that understands users and content and the way information flows between sources. The phrase was just icing on the cake when we heard of it – finally a name to use.

But this brings us to an important question. Why would you care? Sure the whole thing is developer porn. But what’s in it for you, the user?

Web2.0 didn’t really bring you anything but a bunch of beta stuff. The semantic web went by largely in the background, Zemanta being perhaps the most for-the-user of the whole movement. Social networks are merely a logical next step from what we’re used to in the real world. And the real-time web is just flooding you with information every few seconds instead of a few times a day.

So what the hell can the synaptic web do for you?

For the first time in … a very long time … we are finally on the brink of changing the way humans look at information forever. Finally something that helps everybody and isn’t just a cool gimmick.

They Synaptic Web is the only possibility for people to get all the information … in manageable and orderly fashion.

Think about it for a moment. All the information. Manageably!

You will actually be able to read everything your friends say and won’t be flooded by the stream because there’s a gatekeeper helping you out. It’s like having a personal information butler that reads all the boring stuff and then points out what’s really interesting and cool.

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