I'm amazed now thinking I've been back from Florida three weeks. Amazed at both how long and how short it seems, which usually means some life's been lived, which couldn't be truer for me these last weeks. Someday I'll write about our trials down in Florida with adoption and bureaucrats. I'll write when I've had more reflection and walkaway time. It's an amazing story. I'll also write about little Isabel and I finally driving into Bethlehem during Moravian Vespers, which my wife conducts, and Isabel spending her first hour in town listening to Paula's choir and watching handmade Christmas candles...

*teefal wakes as from a long dream, picks up pen and paper, and begins again* Four months ago, we finished the fruits of our work, Tidepool and Storymill, our self-named "Project Realize." The plan after finishing was to engage the blogerati and publicize ourselves with links across the blogosphere. Instead, as such things in the web world usually do, someone stole our thunder: Flickr got bought by Yahoo a week after our launch. They soon snapped up the mindshare we were after; Flickr's become quite the phenonemena, in an area we were aimed directly at. For a while there, it...

Today starts the task of revisiting products and websites in the same space as Tidepool and Storymill. We did some extensive competitive analysis a year ago during the initial design phase, but we've taken a blank page approach since then, not wanting to get into a feature war mindset as we finished things up. Now it's time to revisit iPhoto and Picasa and Flickr and Webshots and Photoshop Album and the rest, then boil it all down to a new website that compares everything with a feature grid, some reviews, and lots of discussion forums. The trick is to do...

A personal request: please take a few minutes to read over Tidepool's features. If you like where we're headed, please help us spread the word by tellings friends or posting mentions of it publicly. We're a small company without much of a marketing budget that has just spent 15 months making two commercial Semantic Web apps. I believe that if we succeed even a little bit, the Semantic Web will be better for it. Thanks, Timothy...

We started integrating FOAF into Storymill and Tidepool more than a year ago. Like the RSS feeds that served up RDF and photos to PhotoBingo, we've hidden the FOAF fruits of our earlier efforts until we update things to be more compatible with our field-level permissions structure. You'd think with FOAF icons and the word "friend" everywhere on the site there'd be a least one FOAF file! Don't worry, they're there. They're just hidden. Every Storymill user will have an automatically generated FOAF file that gets dynamically created for each person that sees it (friends will see more info). The...

Tonight we celebrated Immuexa's seventh anniversary by publicly launching Tidepool and Storymill while having dinner at Bubba's Pot Belly Stove in Quakertown PA. To check out our efforts, visit storymill.com. You can also read the announcement that got mailed out from Bubba's. Quite a trip it's been from our first glimpse release a year ago and project start fifteen months ago. Many heartfelt thanks to Team Realize and the hundred helpful folk who made it all happen....

After nine months of talk and fifteen months of solid work, we're done. Tonight we've released the first selling version of Tidepool and Storymill to a select group of friends. Since there's currently no content on Storymill, we're having a "mill-warming" first, wherein we dress up the place with our favorite photos and stories. After a few weeks of rummaging about the place ourselves, we'll throw open our doors to the world. We go public on March 21st. If you'd like to participate in our "mill-warming", send me an email....

A year ago this morning, I watched my first Florida sunrise as I left behind Florida and (and ISWC) to start a new chapter in my life: This morning, this sunrise, was a beginning not an ending. From here forward, I realize the dream. On the plane home, I worked out the details of my decision. Immuexa, our six year old software & website service business would need to close to new clients to focus on internal product development (which we did). I'd have to learn more about the semantic web, writing down what I found in a blog (which...

Things have been very busy here at Immuexa, as you can likely tell from my recent lack of postings. We're in the eleventh hour, preparing for our impending public release. Personally, life has been full. I could write for hours about everything going on, but with all that's going on, I have no time to write! In fact, I'm so busy that I neglected to announce our third Tidepool preview release, last Saturday. We release a new version (either private, preview, or public) once a month. This month includes a few new features, but mostly addresses snags we found in...

Riding now on the train to Dublin, watching the Irish countryside with its very green fields and patchwork stone walls, I’m finally rested enough to properly reflect on my week in Ireland and the crazy month before. For a small Pennsylvania company to fly to Ireland, there best be a good reason for it. Our primary goal was to create PhotoBingo, then play a game at FOAF Galway, giving nifty shirts to all involved. Beyond this, our goal was useful conversation: Q&A on other efforts, breakout session brainstorming, table chat on shared topics, and feedback on our own products. Though...

We've been extra busy here at Immuexa, trying to get PhotoBingo up and running in time for FOAF Galway. I've been neglecting my blog, which is a sure sign that I'm getting real work done :) Last night I finished the jersey we'll be giving away to people who play the first game, which will be named "1st FOAF Bingo". We'll start it before the workshop and let it run a while after that, so people have time to waste time when they get back home. Here's the bingo jersey, front and back:     The illustrations were done just for...

Today Immuexa agreed to sponsor the First Workshop on FOAF, Social Networking, and the Semantic Web, being held in Galway, Ireland, in early September. We're making "FOAF Bingo", a website game that hopefully will get people uploading photos and annotating using FOAF, much in the same spirit as w3photo.org, only in a somewhat more arbitrary and ridiculous way. I'll write more about it in the next post. Tonight, my mind's on Ireland, having never been there myself. I'm roughly half-Irish, given that my father's mother (King) and my mother's father (Brady) were Irish. My grandma was born and raised there,...

After quite a few discussions, some with our new "technosocial strategist", Jerry Michalski (of Release 1.0 fame), we've decided to delay the public Tidepool release until we've smoothed over the Storymill side of things. This release was supposed to be about Tidepool alone, with Storymill merely acting as a public place to put your photos. With a bit more work though, we can bring out the niftier "semantic social network" features of Storymill. We're gonna wait until Storymill is solid, then release both. When? When they're ready. Our next release date will be "today" :) Let us know if you'd...

This is the hundredth post on this blog, which may not seem a big deal to those accustomed to blogs with ten quick paragraphs a day, but it feels like an accomplishment to me. In the last seven months, I've kept to no more than one post a day, trying to make each post its own little standalone written work, however marginal its view. Yesterday was another milestone: six months since we started Project Realize, our self-funded mission to bring everyone Tidepool & Storymill. We had planned to release the first selling version yesterday, but Jon and I decided to...

As we're writing the press release for the impending Tidepool release, the issue of what category to give it has again resurfaced. Believe it or not, we're leaning towards "semantic juxtaposer" or "juxtaposer". Given that "juxtapose" just got picked as one of Merriam Webster's Top Ten Favorite Words for 2004, this further seals the deal. :) What do you think? "Tidepool's a semantic browser, a digital media organizer, an instant messaging client, an authoring tool, a contact manager, a calendaring app, a PIM sync program, and a personal publisher (blogs & photos & sounds & newsletters), all built upon an...

One of the software publishing maxims we believe strongly is "release early, release often." While many software publishers have release cycles of a year or greater, at Immuexa, we've committed to a seasonal release cycle: once every three months, near the start of each new season. From here on out, you can expect a new public release of Tidepool and Storymill on June 21st (summer), September 21st (autumn), December 21st (winter), and March 21st (spring). Yes, a three-month release cycle is ambitious, but it's even hairier in-house. We do a fully-tested release every month, on the 21st of each month....

After yet another 4am grudge match with both Tidepool and Storymill.net, we're (mostly) ready for the world to see what we've done so far. You can download the Tidepool preview by visiting: http://storymill.net Details on Tidepool and Storymill can also be found at the site. There's also a Flash demo if you don't have time to install the actual program. We had hoped to get Tidepool uploading its w3photo goodness to Storymill, but we're still inches away, so it will have to wait until the next release. You can still output the RDF locally and upload to w3photo. Storymill currently...

Last night I ate dinner at the Carnegie Deli with Nick Gibbins, Stephen Harris, Dave Becket, Libby Miller, Jim Hendler, and several others I know only by IRC nickname. We then chatted till 11pm in the hotel bar about a great many semweb things. I'm exhausted! This morning I packed up and checked out with plenty of time to make my bus, then talked for an hour in the lobby with Mor Naaman from Stanford, causing me to miss my bus by 8 minutes. My penance was sitting two hours on the floor in Port Authority, which is its own...

Waking after what seemed like mere minutes of sleep, I dressed in a daze and wandered down to the photo annotation session of Developer's Day. Greg Elin, Libby Miller, and Mor Naaman gave talks while I played a bit with Tidepool, trying to get it behave. After I made a point regarding privacy at the show, mentioning that we were working on a photo annotation program, Greg asked if I'd like to show it. "Sure", I said without much thought as I wandered up to plug in my Powerbook into the overhead projector. I said a few things about it,...

Here's a photo of me and Jon "finishing up" Tidepool in the "Cyber Cafe" this afternoon, while across the hall the conference was officially closing. Eight hours later we're still at it, mostly struggling with issues that weren't originally scheduled for this release, such as uploading the w3photo stuff to storymill. We've been very close to good enough for hours now, but we still can't upload and publish photos and RDF from Tidepool. The rest of the program works fine. Ah well, time for sleep. If I seem half asleep on Developer Day, you'll know why. I had a long...

Just got back from two meals at the Zen Palace, first with semweb photo folks such as Jennifer Golbeck, Ben Shneiderman, Nick Gibbins, and Stephen Harris, then as we were leaving, I ran into Libby Miller, Dave Beckett, Dave Reynolds, etc, so stayed for their meal. Five hours of dinner talk. Storymill.net will have to wait. :)...

An hour away from the start of www2004, I'm in my hotel room at the Sheraton, listening to the coffee brew and my wife Paula prepare for her bus trip back to Pennsylvania. We've been here three days, starting with an Ani Difranco concert in Carnegie Hall on Saturday, then roaming round Greenwich Village, South Street Seaport, and lower Manhattan on Sunday, then sleep and work on Monday, topped off with Times Square and Super Size Me, a film that cured me of fast food forever. Now Paula's leaving, which is making me sad. I wish she were staying the...

My wife plays Solitaire incessantly. She's got a PhD and a professor's schedule, but nearly every time I look over at her laptop, she's reflexively sorting cards into piles, playing Freecell or some variation. She tells me it relaxes her, which seems reasonable enough, even if my idea of relaxing involves a dark room and a soft pillow. She's not alone. Solitaire is easily the most popular computer program of all time. More popular than email or web browsing, Solitaire is often the first program people use. I used it to teach my mom how to use a mouse. It's...

While outside it's been a warm inviting Spring, inside we've been driven by single focus, aimed at our product launch in June. Others sometimes call this the "death march" period, which personally I think is disrespectful of those forced to take real deach marches. Besides, death marches are usually considered unhealthy and ultimately counter-productive. Instead, I prefer to call our development endgame, the period of sustained focus before a release, a toboggan run. For those that haven't experienced a real toboggan run, it's starts high up on a snowy hill with five or six people looking down the slope at...

After scrambling for days toward an ambitious release date, we managed today to pull the pieces together enough for our first private release of Tidepool. At the very last minute, we discovered a showstopper bug having to do with Java Web Start. I was actually about to press "Send" on the announcement email, then we found it. Ah well. At least we had a nice lunch to celebrate Immuexa's sixth. Many thanks to everyone who kicked ass to (almost) make this date. Not pictured, but there in spirit, are two Russians, two Canadians, one Brit, one Clevelander, and an American...

Writing the website text for Tidepool, I'm realizing that people may have a tough time putting the product into an established software category. If PC Magazine were to include us in an "Editor's Choice" roundup, I'm not sure which category we'd be in. Tidepool's a semantic browser, a digital media organizer, an instant messaging client, an authoring tool, a contact manager, a calendaring app, a PIM sync program, and a personal publisher (blogs & photos & sounds & newsletters), all built upon an agent-based control system and extension mechanism. Sounds like we've bolted a bunch of stuff where it doesn't...

I started this blog in November with the goal of posting once a day, which I kept to for two months, then settled into a rhythm of once every five days. Now that we're trudging hip-deep through the project, it's harder to make time to write. It's even harder to find time to research and reflect on the Semantic Web and its inevitable implications. Such writing requires a stand-back perspective. Instead, my head's been buried in the details of development. What have we been up to? Well, some of you may be interested in the way we're mixing FOAF with...

This morning my house is surrounded by fog so thick it's hard to see the ground from my upstairs window. I can almost feel the earth drinking in the needed moisture this wet morning. In recent weeks, the weather has been getting warmer. The highest, most stubborn, snow drifts are completely melted. We even went geocaching last weekend. For those that live in a place where it doesn't snow, you should spend a winter in a place like Pennsylvania. It's impossible to describe a spring approaching. The changes are subtle, fragrant, wet, and green. Birds slowly arrive. Deer quicken their...

To avoid brand confusion with the Wavemarket products, we've decided against the name Waveplace for our desktop app. We've picked another name we like even better: Tidepool™ Tidepool lets you collect, organize, describe, and browse your personal memories, such as digital photographs, movies, sound clips, and stories. With Tidepool, you can tell the who, what, where, and, when of it, using semantic web tagging technology. You can then browse through your memories semantically, with one thing suggesting another, and another. Looking at a photo of Katie on vacation at the beach in 2002, you can then look at other photos...

Hi <first name>, I enjoyed our phone talk the other day. Here are a few thoughts before our next call. First, to review, Tidepool™ is our desktop application (built with Java) that people will use to organize their photos & memories. It's in the same marketing space as Adobe Photoshop Album and Apple iPhoto, though we have no illusions of beating Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple at their own game. We're just hoping to skim a little off the top, meanwhile bringing a more authentic, more human, approach to the task. Memories are precious. They form the substance of our shared...

Today, after five weeks of obsessive product name uncertainty, our team finally agreed on a new name to replace Akimbo for our desktop application: Waveplace™. Along the way, we considered 137 names, of which eight were given serious consideration. In the end, we went back to a name we already had. I thought of the name Waveplace in June of 1999 when I bought the domains for a "a web-based interactive story realm for children aged 5 through 10 that includes interactive plot lines, animations, games, and cognitive bot characters that learn about each child and make suggestions according to...

I lived in Florida for a few years in my mid-twenties in a town called Bonita Springs, between Naples and Fort Myers, just south of Sanibel. It's where I started my first business in 1989, hoping to create something like the web. It's where I first faced the business world as an adult, where I took my first "slings and arrows", where I did a lot of growing up. After I left Florida for Pennsylvania, my parents moved to Bonita permanently. I went back to visit at least once a year for the next eleven years. A lot of life...

Last night, I was driving around in a snowstorm, trying to think of a new name for our desktop product. The name game can drive you nuts. It's best to think of it as a game you play for fun, like Concentration or Password. There's a continuum of obviousness when it comes to naming products. Years ago, when trying to name an EDI engine that translates medical records between different databases, my manager insisted on "InfoServer" as a name. I had to go over his head, taking my name, "Rosetta", to his boss before they went with it. At worst,...

What's in a name? Well, when you're selling something, quite a lot. A good product name can focus people on your core benefit. It can crystallize the characteristics that set you apart from your competitors. Names can be inspiring, inviting, intriguing. Most of all, they can make money, which is why trademarks are their own little turf war. Today we lost "Akimbo" as a product name. Turns out there's a startup in California that choose the name four months ago, headed by the co-founder of ReplayTV. We had a nice chat this evening. Very likable guy. While it's not clear...

I started a science fiction story back in 1986 about a small device called an "Immuexus", which was essentially a tablet computer with a semantic user interface. Instead of a mouse or touchpad, the user used a special pen that served three purposes: first, it was used as a pointer for the screen, much like a mouse; second, it could scan text (and OCR it) while reading a book, line-by-line; third, it had gyro-like sensors, so you could use it to navigate a 3D visualized space by tilting it forward and back, left and right. Back in 1986, this really...

Tonight I found myself wondering in Wegmans, an incredibly overstocked and expensive supermarket, waiting for my wife to finish shopping while I mulled over some design quandaries having to do with our current project. We're trying to match our existing object model with RDF, since we'd like to leverage as much of the power of RDF and related technologies as we can. Why build when you can borrow? Besides, we'd like to integrate with the world, both now and in the future. That's the point of standards, yes? So, here I am, using a supermarket as a development example. Two...

Our lives are what we remember. Our culture, our society, our heritage: it's the knowledge we share that defines us. Memories and imaginings form the substance of our shared humanity. Preserving and publishing our memories, whether the story of our individual lives or the history of our neighborhoods, is a profound and necessary endeavor, for it brings us together as a people. Cherishing our shared heritage helps create and sustain real community, real meaningfulness, which many of us hunger for as an alternative to the soulless singularity of corporate branding and rubber stamp franchises that are slowly erasing the color...

Today my company, Immuexa, formally begins "Project Realize", our own attempt to bring Semantic Web goodness to everyone. Our plan is to develop and market two software products that share the same purpose: helping people organize, explore, and share their digital memories. Tidepool™ (formerly Akimbo and Waveplace) is a desktop application that can be run on any computer. Storymill™ is a web application that's used through a web browser. Both do much the same thing -- they're similar but separate interfaces to the same shared functionality and codebase. Each product will play to the strengths of its interface. Tidepool, the...

The idea for my company's current project began in January 1999 while I was trying to teach my mom, Rosemary, how to email photos taken with her new Kodak digital camera. The software that came with it was called PictureEasy, and was pretty easy. Of the two dozen photo programs I've used since, it was probably the best for her, but it still had some snags that tripped her up from time to time. Over the next few years, whenever we went to visit her in Bonita Springs, Florida (half an hour from Sanibel), I'd download a bunch of new...