[viksit]

Thought: There's going to be a need for a very open platform that can do things like this, which will offset many of the worries that have been echoed on this thread today about one or a few corporations having access to everything.

To use an analogy - if messaging apps are the new "browsers", then content accessed through them are the new "websites". What FB is doing is the equivalent of AOL in the 90s.

What then, is the equivalent of a search engine like Google/Yahoo, in that world?

[doublerebel]

I believe we don't want an equivalent to Google/Yahoo -- we need an improvement over search. Rather than trusting corporations to deliver the knowledge we seek, we should rely on our personal trust graph -- like we did in the old days. Otherwise the constant influx of biased, irrelevant information will be overwhelming.

What if you could get a recommendation from your friend's friend without asking them, and without violating trust or privacy? This is what I am building today.

[wallacrw]

The search engine would have to be the NLP and information retrieval that's turning the requests into actions or answers.

Which is why I'll now plug the company I work for, MindMeld, since (i) we do that better than Wit and (ii) we are not feeding our data to an advertising team.

[lbotos]

For a period, a few people thought that twitter had enough sway to be that new "messaging search" engine. I've used it in such a way when I wanted to find hyper localized information.