The question I’m trying to ask myself whenever I develop something these days is “who is my first customer going to be?”

At Attivio, we’ve gone one step further: our product, the Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) has a feature called Facet Finder that analyzes each result set on-the-fly and automatically identifies the best facets for that search. (No pre-computing or manual configuration required.)

I also agree with your sentiment about the relational database: it is definitely time for something new! AIE can index structured (i.e. relational) and unstructured data and has a query-side JOIN() search operator that allows you to use relationships (as a database does) and combine that with full-text operations.

Visit our website if you’d like to learn more… thanks!

For those interested in learning more about faceted search at a modest price, I encourage you to check out my recently published book on the subject.

YouTube has signed deals with various record labels. It looks like the Sony agreement would cover Courtney’s video.

One, some apps do a terrible job with long urls. Ever get an email with an url that’s been cut up across multiple lines and you have to perform minor surgery on it before you can open it? Yes, there’s a bug somewhere in the message chain, but that’s reality.

Two, analytics. Ever want to know how many people click thru the link you sent in email, post twitter or facebook, …? An URL shortener can tell you (bit.ly and other do). Not a terrible way to measure your influence and raise your ad rates.

Three, central point of failure is concern, but (a) that’s easy to overcome by publishing your mapping so others can mirror it, and (b) URL shorteners can actually reduce failure by archiving the page they point to. That helps with link rot.

Four, you other concerns you mention are valid, though I could just as easily argue that URL shorteners can help with those things. Imagine an URL shortener that verifies the target url to make sure that there is no SPAM, malware, etc. Similarly, imagine an URL shortener that verifies the target url for inappropriate content (whatever that may be) that increases trust instead of diminishing it.

Any how, I can imagine all sorts of other interesting services that you could integrate into an URL shortener. I love that folks are experimenting. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let’s see how much value we can squeeze out of this. If there’s enough aggregate value, I’m sure there will be a bunch of consolidation, and then a Google or Microsoft will notice and buy one.

I’ve posted this in both our comments.

Could you suggest some “real applications” for me? I’d love to test these ideas out in a really challenging context!

On that note, I’ve been asked about whether these kinds of ideas would work inside an enterprise with something like accounting software or time sheets. My general answer is an emphatic “Yes!” What I’m discussing are essentially human behaviors. I believe if there is a human involved involved in the interaction, then these kinds of things would work (to different degrees or altered for context, of course!).

As far as the perception that these are slick marketing techniques– yes and no. I’m a designer at heart, meaning I [heart] designing good experiences that are meaningful, useful, enjoyable, etc. (more here: http://www.poetpainter.com/thoughts/article/classifying-experiences ). I strongly oppose anything that smells of a bait and switch! In fact, when I use the “getting to first base” analogy, the end goal isn’t a home run (“Close the deal!”), the end goal is lasting love and devotion– which only happens with product/service experiences that deliver the goods day after day! The unfortunate part of this is that you can have a truly great product that no one will sit down to truly understand before they make up their mind. People in general are hit with too much noise all the time. I don’t think of the ideas I’m discussing as slick marketing– I think of this as optimizing for human behaviors. If we know our product is really, really good, but we’re having trouble communicating that– these ideas are intended to help good product designers/developers ease users into using a new product. When I talk about business goals, I talk about value centered design ( http://www.bplusd.org/2005/10/08/value-centered-design/ which is about business AND user value. I’m fond of quoting Peter Drucker who said “there is no business without customers.”

You can have the most valuable product in the world, but if no one sticks around long enough to realize that– what do you do next? Just offering something of use to someone and gradually revealing features isn’t enough given what we know about attention and decision making.