Russell Manley became Fluidinfo CEO last November. Although many people are aware of the change, we’ve not announced it until now as we’ve been busy working on the new UI, have been settling in with how Russell is running the company, and he’s been getting to know our investors better.

Russell pointed me to Delicious back in late 2005, after he’d read the early work I did on Fluidinfo in the late 90s. That led directly to the founding of Fluidinfo in London. The corporate address was Russell’s home, and the two of us formed the board. Because we only needed programmers early on, we planned for Russell to join full time once the Fluidinfo architecture was developed and deployed and we had significant external interest. Last November Russell took the plunge, resigned from his London job, and took over from me as CEO.

Russell is extraordinarily competent. He spent 10 years as a “company doctor” in London. He went into a dozen companies as CFO, COO, or CEO, charged with turning them around. Walk around central London with him and it seems that almost everything you see he’s had a hand in running. The diversity of his operations and management experience is extraordinary. In 2005 he joined SMIF, a Secondary Market Infrastructure Fund, where he helped acquire, manage, and eventually sell hundreds of assets: long-term management contracts and debt on UK schools, motorways, hospitals, prisons etc. Russell was frequently in the middle of deals worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. SMIF sold themselves to Land Securities Group for $1.4B, where Russell became an Investment Director. Soon afterwards he and a few others spun themselves out of Land Securities to form Semperian. Russell became Group Communications Director and also CIO. He directed the set-up of their entire IT infrastructure in the clouds, a daring and difficult move to pull off in 2007, especially with the stakes so high (Semperian supports about $3B of public sector infrastructure). Russell devised and ran Semperian’s company systems and processes and sat on the board of over 30 companies. Just before joining Fluidinfo he spent 9 months restructuring one of their companies and then negotiating its very complex sale. In the final act he spent two full days signing the 600+ documents he’d coordinated among 28 parties involved in the sale. He knows how to close a deal.

That’s just a sample of Russell’s background and skills—there’s a lot more where that came from. As you can probably guess, we’re extremely happy to now have him running Fluidinfo

This video shows how the Fluidinfo Chrome extension displays relevant content, in context, while you browse:

We’ve added information to Fluidinfo for all the tags O’Reilly Radar have used on their articles since 2005. For example, nine articles were tagged with “patent reform”. Select those words anywhere you run into them on the web and a pop-up will show you links to the Radar posts. Content on almost 4000 topics that have been discussed on Radar is now just a click away. Because pop-ups are triggered when you select text, they are only displayed when and where relevant.

As you’ll see in the video, we’ve also added information about all O’Reilly books and authors.

To make things easier for first-timers, if you simply install the extension you’ll see all the O’Reilly content with no need to configure anything. You can log in and adjust things later if you like it and want to customize what you see. Give it a whirl—it’s fun and interesting.

Fluidinfo CEO Russell Manley and I were interviewed by Robert Scoble at his home in Half Moon Bay a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoy talking to Robert. He’s unique in his ability to do both breadth and depth. He covers a wide array of the very latest internet technology at blistering speed, and yet he really digs in to the stuff that he finds fascinating. Robert interviewed me in Barcelona over three years ago – we spent about six hours together talking about Fluidinfo and technology in general. He was sitting in the front row during our TechCrunch disrupt presentation in 2010 (see the fun coincidence between Robert and John Borthwick at the 4 minute mark), and he was one of the judges when we won the Top Technology prize in 2011 at the LAUNCH conference. It’s great to be on Robert’s radar and to have his support.

The video is below. You’ll find some comments on it in Robert’s Google+ posting.

We’re delighted to announce that Neil Levine (LinkedIn, Twitter) has today joined Fluidinfo as VP Product. Neil has been working in the industry for over 17 years and has a great track record of taking both consumer and enterprise products to market, most notably at Canonical, where he was VP of Corporate Services and also Director of Information Infrastructure. He’s based in the Bay Area.

I met Neil a year ago via an introduction from Jamu Kakar (also of Fluidinfo). Neil had been Jamu’s boss at Canonical, and had a stellar reputation. We got on really well immediately, and stayed in contact. I often wondered if one day we’d be lucky enough to find someone like Neil to join us on the product side. We’ve always been careful and patient in hiring, looking for people we think are brilliant and who really “get” Fluidinfo at a fundamental level. People who can’t stop thinking about what a Fluidinfo-enabled future could offer. Neil certainly fits that category, and we’re thrilled to have him on board. So, please join us in welcoming him to the team!

There are about 50 million Tumblr blogs, so there’s a reasonable chance you or some of your friends are use Tumblr. It’s now possible to import Tumblr data into Fluidinfo with just a couple of clicks. If you follow someone on Fluidinfo who’s done that, and you’re a Chrome user, we have some great news for you. Have a look at this:

If you install the Fluidinfo Chrome extension and follow a few people, as shown in the video, you’ll soon be getting little pop-ups telling you when you stumble across things the people you follow have mentioned on Tumblr. Note that you don’t have to be a Tumblr user to do this, you can just follow some people who are.

Fluidinfo is now doing imports of all URLs, #hashtags, and @names that people mention on Twitter and on Tumblr and tying it all together. The chrome browser extension surfaces that information for you as you browse. We have a new Firefox extension that’s about to go into beta, and imports of Delicious and Diigo are in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

Here’s a 4 minute video that shows what it’s like to browse the web with the Fluidinfo Chrome extension:

We’re really excited about where this is heading. The extension allows you to do several tricks not shown in the video, and we have more on the way. In a follow-up post we’ll take you through some of the features.

If you’re a programmer and want to get involved, or the extension gives you ideas for something you’d like to build, grab the source code from Github. We’d love to hear what you think. Comment below, email us at info@fluidinfo.com, or come hang out in the #fluidinfo channel on Freenode.

Getting Started With Fluidinfo is now available in hardcopy and various eBook formats from O’Reilly. The authors, Nicholas Radcliffe (@njr) and Nicholas Tollervey (@ntoll), know Fluidinfo inside out, as you might hope. They’ve written multiple Fluidinfo client libraries, web applications, command line tools, visualizations, have written many blog posts about Fluidinfo, have imported tons of data into the system, and have both contributed to the design and architecture in many ways. The books is extremely well written. Both of the Nicholases are entertaining and clear writers.

The first chapter has a wonderful introduction and overview of Fluidinfo, and should be understandable by a broad audience. After that, things get more technical with a chapter on using Fish, a Fluidinfo shell, either from your shell command line or via Shell-fish, a web interface. Playing directly with Fluidinfo, adding to objects and running queries, is probably the best way to understand its (very simple!) data model. Then it’s on to programmatic access, using two Python libraries (one low level, one high level) and via Javascript. An example social book reader application is built from the ground up in Javascript. The book concludes with chapters on the REST API, advanced use of Fish, discussion of the special Fluidinfo about tag, and a description of the query language.

We hope you’ll grab a copy and come join us either on the fluidinfo-users or fluidinfo-discuss mailing lists, or on the #fluidinfo IRC channel on Freenode (chat right now with a web based client). We’ll be happy to say hi and to help get you going.

If you import your tweets into Fluidinfo, you can use our new web interface to see interesting information about all the @names, #hashtags and URLs you’ve mentioned on Twitter. To get going, just go to Fluidinfo and log in with Twitter (top right).

Fluidinfo will fetch your past tweets from Twitter and will examine them for all the @names, #hashtags, and URLs you’ve ever mentioned. That will probably take some minutes to complete (reload the page to check the import status).

For each of your tweets, we extract the @names, #hashtags, and URLs it mentions and we add to the Fluidinfo page for each of them. To make this more concrete, here are examples from people who have already imported their tweets into Fluidinfo:

Example: the #occupy hashtag Here’s the Fluidinfo page for #occupy. Click the links on the left of that page to explore different views of #occupy information in Fluidinfo and across the web. For example, you can see mentions of #occupy by Paul Kedrosky, mentions of #occupy by Tim O’Reilly, and mentions of #occupy by Ethan Zuckerman. On the right is a screenshot that shows some of how #occupy appears to me when I look at my friends’ mentions of it (click to see a larger version). Along with the page for #occupy, Fluidinfo has a page for every hashtag.

Example: a URL In December 2011, Fred Wilson blogged about Freedom To Innovate. Fluidinfo has a page for the URL of Fred’s post. Click the links on the left of that page to explore. Later, Tim O’Reilly tweeted about the post. Tim has imported his tweets into Fluidinfo, so you can see his "mentioned" tag on the URL of Fred’s post. Brad Feld, who has also imported his tweets, mentioned Fred’s post as well. On the right is a screenshot that shows some of how Fred’s post appears to me when I look at my friends’ mentions of it (click to see a larger version). Along with the page for Fred’s article, Fluidinfo has a page for every URL.

Example: @sarawinge Esther Dyson mentioned (via retweeting) Sara Winge, so on the @sarawinge page in Fluidinfo you should expect to see Esther’s mentions of Sara. If you explore the views on the left of that page, you’ll also see mentions of Sara by @marcprecipice, @pkedrosky, @timoreilly, and others. Along with the page for @sarawinge, Fluidinfo has a page for every @username.

Example: scientific american Just as it does for @names, Fluidinfo tags the user’s name (as given on Twitter). So because Joi Ito has mentioned @sciam (the Twitter account for Scientific American), the "scientific american" page in Fluidinfo has Joi’s mentions of @sciam. The views on the left of that page show mentions of Scientific American by others, as well as lots of other information from across the web. And yes, you guessed it, along with the page for "scientific american", Fluidinfo has a page for every name.

Add to these pages yourself! If you import your tweets, your mentions of @names, hashtags and URLs will also be added to pages in Fluidinfo. But don’t forget that you can also add your own tags to any page at all. After you log in, click the green Tag button to add something. Enter a tag name (e.g., comment) and a value (the text of your comment) and click Submit.

Next up… search In a follow-on post, I’ll show you how to use the secret terminal built into the Fluidinfo. The terminal lets you search your tweets, find things different people have mentioned in common, and much more besides.

Image: rosweed

In 2003, Joshua Schachter released Delicious, and brought tagging to the web. Delicious gave normal users a place to store and share their information about any web page. By January 2007, a Pew Internet & American Life Project study had found that 28% of online Americans had used tagging. As offered by Delicious, and popularized by sites such as Flickr and Technorati, basic tagging has three fundamental properties:

1. You can tag any URL.
2. You don’t have to ask permission.
3. Shared public tagging creates social value

Most fundamentally, tagging made the web more writeable. This changed our perception of the web itself, from something that was almost entirely read-only to something where we were suddenly invited to contribute. The change was a cornerstone of what Tim O’Reilly dubbed “Web 2.0″. It’s what Fred Wilson describes as “giving every person a voice“. Fred quotes Ev Williams, a Twitter founder, who says “society has not fully realized what this means”. One view of Twitter is that it offers a form of simple self-tagging. Viewing tagging as low-friction publication of small pieces of information about things, Twitter has done for people what Delicious did for URLs.

Tagging with Fluidinfo

The model of information in Fluidinfo takes tagging to a new level. Over the last three months we’ve been hard at work building a user interface (UI) to make this possible. The two main additional properties of tagging with Fluidinfo are:

4. You can tag anything at all, not just URLs.
5. Tags can optionally be given values.

Tagging is too powerful an idea to be restricted to just URLs or people. It should be possible to tag anything. And, as you’ll see below, tags with values are powerful and natural. We tag with values in the non-digital world all the time.

Tag anything at all

Every day each of us encounters thousands of things that are not URLs. With Fluidinfo you can tag anything you can name. You can tag songs, movies, and books – just put the name into the box at the top of the Fluidinfo page, hit RETURN, and you’ll be looking at the page for that thing in Fluidinfo. If you’re logged in, you can add tags. Look at what pops up on the left to see other information about the object. You can also tag a product name, an email address, a person’s name, an IP address, a license plate number, a place name, flight numbers, a word or phrase, a zip code, a stock symbol, a latitude/longitude pair, a Twitter @name or #hashtag, taxi medallion numbers, time/date combinations, phone numbers, a DNA sequence, a chess position or a Sudoku puzzle, etc. To get to the Fluidinfo object for something, just visit http://fluidinfo.com/about/something. The easiest way to jump to the Fluidinfo page for something you see on the web is via a browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). Just right-click on a link, an image, on selected text, or on the page itself, and jump straight to that thing in Fluidinfo.

Tag with values

With Fluidinfo, you can provide a value when tagging. Tagging with values will seem new to many people, but it’s actually not new at all. Look at the luggage tag image above. It has (implicitly) a ‘destination’ tag with a value of ‘JFK’, it has a tag named ‘Flight number’ with a value of 222, a tag named ‘Row’ with a value of 3, a ‘Sorting Symbol’ with value ‘B’ and something else whose value is 821474. Those tag names and values are all put on the same physical tag because they’re related, and it makes sense that they travel together, attached to the luggage. So, far from being new, tagging with values simply provides us with something familiar which has always existed in the physical world of tagging.

To give some examples in Fluidinfo, I have put a ‘rating’ tag onto Gone With the Wind with a value of 4. A tag value can be anything at all: a comment, a set of keywords, ‘longitude’ and ‘latitude’ tags with numeric values, even arbitrary data (e.g., some HTML, an image, a PDF file).

Most interesting, a tag value can be a URL (or list of URLs). You might tag an image with a value that is the URL of another image. You might put a ‘for-dad’ tag onto something with a value pointing to a video. In the Fluidinfo UI, tag values that are URLs are shown as simplified embedded pages or images.

Examples of things in Fluidinfo

Here are links to a variety of things in Fluidinfo. Take a look at the list of links on the left of each page. These are ‘views’ of the data, either from different sources or displayed in different ways. If you log in, you’ll be able to add your own tags.

• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I’ve added a collection of cover images via a tag whose value is list of URLs.
• Desert Island Discs. Russell Manley has added his selection of favorites using tag values that are URLs.
• Sphero. Russell (rustlem) has tagged it to say he wants one and has added an image and a video.
• Using the @name convention, here’s my object (@terrycojones). See the map? It appears automatically because I added latitude and longitude tags showing where I misspent my youth (in Sydney), and where I am now (in New York).
• The #occupy hashtag. You can see Paul Kedrosky mentioned this hashtag on Twitter on 2011/10/19 and that I mentioned it on 2011/11/17.
• Nova Spivack‘s insightful tweet: http://twitter.com/#!/novaspivack/status/4999653280. Twitter annotations, anyone?
• The Shawshank Redemption.
• Black Hole Sun (Soundgarden song).

Namespaces and tags provide a powerful mechanism for organizing information.  The Fluidinfo API provides a set of tools for creating, describing and using them to store information about anything and everything. Until now, you had to create them before you could use them to store values, but we’ve changed that. Namespaces and tags are now created automatically, on first use, provided you have permission to do so. A number of API calls that had to be made in the past are no longer necessary, which makes storing data easier and faster than before.

Permissions provide fine-grained privacy controls to define who has access to see and work with information in Fluidinfo. By default, Fluidinfo creates permissions that grant everyone read access to information, while limiting write access to the author of the information. This is good for the most part, as Fluidinfo and its users benefit from sharing information with each other. The default behaviour could cause surprising results when used with a namespace that had been locked down and made private though, because the new namespaces and tags would be public.  This is no longer the case. Permissions for new namespaces and tags now inherit from their parent namespace, at creation time. Changing permissions for existing namespaces and tags won’t cause any changes to propagate to children.

Namespace permissions are inherited one-to-one. That is, the create namespace permission is copied to a new child namespace, the update namespace permission is copied to a new child namespace, and so on. Tags are a little bit different because they have a different set of permissions than namespaces. The update tag, delete tag, write tag value and delete tag value permissions are all inherited from the create namespace permission on the parent namespace. The read tag value permission is inherited from the list namespaces permission on the parent namespace. Control permissions are inherited from the namespace’s control permissions.

The combination of automatic namespaces and tags with inherited permissions makes Fluidinfo both easier and safer to use. We hope you enjoy these changes!