Matthew Ingram reports, “Twitter made an interesting acquisition on Thursday, when it bought a young Canadian startup called Summify, a company whose service (as its name implies) was designed to cut through the noise of all those social-media streams and summarize the content that matters. More than anything, this is perhaps the single biggest hole that exists not just in Twitter but Facebook and other services as well: the need to give users more ways of filtering the massive amounts of information that keep flooding their activity streams and other social-media inboxes. There are so many ways of producing and sharing content but so few good ways of filtering.” Read more

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iXiGO, a travel meta search engine has launched a new flight search tool for Facebook and Twitter that utilizes natural language processing. According to an article by Anupam Saxena, “Users can directly post a query on iXiGO’s Facebook page or make a twitter mention to @iXiGOsearch with the query. iXiGO says that it will reply to the user with a comment on his query with details of the cheapest flight found across multiple travel sites, a link to the relevant iXiGO.com result page where the user can filter the results by time, stops, price and other factors, as well as a direct booking link for booking the cheapest flight on the travel site where it is available.” Read more

Google has introduced a new feature to their search engine: Search, plus Your World. The official announcement states, “We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features: (1) Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page; (2) Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and, (3) People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.” Read more

From Dropbox to Google Docs, cloud applications are increasingly becoming a part of business users’ everyday productivity toolbox. Hojoki – taken from the name of an old Japanese book about the way of life and the flow of events – aims to aggregate those cloud apps into a Facebook-like activity feed, underpinned by semantic technology.

“We really think the real pain point up to now is that work and communication about work are separated,” says Martin Böhringer, co-founder and CEO. “We integrate the productivity apps that people already are using so that they show up in the stream” where people are communicating.

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We recently rounded up some thought leaders’ perspectives on the big semantic trends of 2011 – most (if not all) of them positive. Here’s some further perspective about where hopes and expectations fell a little short of reality:

• The biggest lost possibility was not rethinking the whole RDF stack. Instead of actually reducing complexity, it seems the direction is hiding complexity. This makes its proposition unattractive for web developers. – Andraž Tori, Founder and Director, Zemanta

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StreamGlider, which we first covered here, made its debut yesterday. The iPad news and social reader application in its initial version debuts sans the location-aware and some of the more heavy-duty semantic topic stream smarts discussed in that piece, but newly named StreamGlider Inc. CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application – says to expect them in updates beginning in March. McDaniel is partners in StreamGlider with co-founder Nova Spivack, also CEO of Bottlenose among other pursuits, and co-founder John Breslin, DERI researcher, NUI Galway lecturer,  and founder of New Tech Post.

What’s in the current version that McDaniel says differentiates the software from other iPad news reader apps like Pulse and Flipboard are real-time news streams composed of mixed media – sources such as RSS, YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and Facebook – so you can see news items, images, video, social media updates and more about particular content of interest, any way you like in a stream. “You can put them all together in a single stream so you can build streams to be more topic-oriented,” McDaniel says.

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It’s the Day of the Dolphin. Bottlenose (previously known as Bottleno.se), which we initially covered here, moves out of stealth and into private beta mode. The service lassoes your Twitter, Facebook and Yammer streams, and drives real-time understanding and surfacing of personally relevant content so that you don’t have to read everything (not that you ever could!). It debuts with a new architecture for leveraging “crowd computing” for enabling scale and for creating more and more “semantic stream” smarts around the flood of information on social networks.

Nova Spivack and co-founder and CTO Dominiek ter Heide (formerly CTO of Cerego Japan who has long been tackling the issue of distilling interest profiles behind social streams) are the minds behind the service. Spivack has essentially referred to Bottlenose as everything, and more, that Twitter Annotations never was.

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A new article asks, “How stable is China? What are people discussing and thinking in Pakistan? To answer these sorts of questions, the U.S. government has turned to a rich source: social media… The CIA maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of a nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts at the agency’s Open Source Center, who other agents refer to as ‘vengeful librarians,’ are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad.” Read more

So, how many things have you liked today? Chances are that somewhere in the last 24 hours you’ve given a thumbs-up to a news article you came across on a friend’s Facebook post, a movie on Netflix, or a beer garden on Foursquare.

An application in beta from Cascaad, dubbed CircleMe, hopes to be the single source for hosting and managing all your likes.  “Typically you leave those traces all over the web but they aren’t leveraged,” says Erik Lumer, Cascaad founder and executive chairman. “It’s in your profile somewhere but you’re not getting much out of it.” Lumer says Cascaad is betting there’s value to help users manage the activity on their likes in one place, so that they can get more out of them such as more easily tracking new things underway that are connected to what they already like, or get recommendations from others with similar interests. And to do it with greater permanence, so to speak. As Lumer points out, you can potentially discover a new book on Facebook that one of your friends liked, but “two hours later it’s gone. There are hundreds of messages on top of it. There’s not a clean way to leverage that effectively, so in that sense I think we are very complementary” to Facebook likes.

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Get ready for some new apps for Elsevier’s Sciverse framework. Last year Elsevier, which has one of the largest vaults of scientific data in the world, launched its Sciverse Applications module. This provided a way for researchers and scientists to develop and share customized solutions that improve search and discovery of its wealth of integrated content and meta-data in the SciVerse hub of ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Sciverse SciTopics, and targeted web content.

Now it’s announced the winners of its Apps For Science competition, social and semantic ones that plug into the framework among them (see above). Elsevier recognizes that when it comes to meeting researchers’ search and discovery needs, it can’t do it all alone. “We’re not going to come up with all the solutions ourselves, so a key goal is to collaborate with developers and researchers to provide tools,” says Rafael Sidi, Vice President Product Management, Applications Marketplace and Developer Network, Elsevier

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