We’re happy to announce a second closing of Fluidinfo‘s Series A investment round. We’ve raised another $170K, taking the round to just under $1M in total. Some of the people investing in the second closing are:

Michael Parekh: A Wall Streeter for over 20 years and former partner at Goldman Sachs, Michael founded and helped to build the Internet Research effort at the firm (twitter, more info).

Esther Dyson: who seed funded Fluidinfo in late 2007, and who’s been a huge source of help ever since (and before). We’re thrilled to have her following on in this round (twitter, more info).

David Snow: the Editor in Chief of PEI Media. David also participated in the seed funding of Fluidinfo (twitter, more info).

Ted Carroll and Earl Macomber: who were both also seed-stage backers of Fluidinfo. Ted and Earl are the managing principals of traditional information and media focused private equity firm Noson Lawen Partners, and have again made personal investments (twitter, more info).

Ed Carroll: who was also a seed stage Fluidinfo investor. Ed is now entering his senior year in high school and hopes to attend USC next year as a freshman at The Marshall School. Ed spent a month at Marshall this summer and walked away with Top Five honors in their Entrepreneurialism program. Good luck Ed!

There are three other new investors who also came into the round, but who prefer not to be mentioned publicly at this stage (so you’ll have to ask us about them privately ). The above all join Betaworks, IA Ventures, RRE Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Chris Dixon & Founder Collective, Joshua Schacter, Andrew Rasiej, Ross Williams, and Esther Speight as Fluidinfo Series A investors.

Our thanks to everyone!

We’re using the Techcrunch Disrupt event to launch FluidDB into a real alpha. Until today we’ve only let a small number of people in to play with the API, and we’ve been giving away API passwords by hand. As of today, we’re taking the brakes off a little, allowing anyone to sign up and begin using the FluidDB API. Of course to do that it will help enormously if you’re a programmer

Although FluidDB has been up and running for 9 months, we’re being careful not to raise expectations too quickly. So for now we’re still labeling it an “alpha”. We have concrete plans for what will constitute a beta—these are mainly to do with speed and with adding flexibility to the API to reduce the number of calls apps have to make—and plan to be in beta by the end of 2010. Now that we have our funding cleared up, and can hire more developers, you can expect FluidDB development to ramp up quickly.

Please feel free to comment below. We’re listening!

Fluidinfo has been selected as a finalist in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield taking place today in New York.

Over 500 companies from around the world applied to present at TechCrunch Disrupt, and only 20 were accepted. We’ll be on stage fighting for the right to call ourselves the most disruptive start-up on the planet

It’s quite an accomplishment and an honor to be selected as a finalist. The entry process wasn’t simple: a written application, a 5-minute video, a phone interview with TC CEO Heather Harde, a couple of hours talking and demoing to Erick Schonfeld, a written script of a presentation (with lots of suggestions from Erick), and several live rehearsals. Ben Siscovick of IA Ventures is kindly helping with the live presentation. And along the way I had to reluctantly pull out of giving a presentation at the NY Tech Meetup. Thanks to John Borthwick of Betaworks and to Todd Levy of bit.ly for helping cover for me, and especially to Nate Westheimer the NYTM organizer for his understanding and support.

I’ve never really liked these startup competitions. They amount of time allotted to present always seems too little, and the audience too general. But more importantly, they’ve always seemed biased towards startups working on much simpler things, with snazzy UIs and demos – exactly the kind of thing we never had. But the theme of TechCrunch Disrupt was too irresistible to ignore. In the demo video I submitted, I told them I had no demo and that real disruption will not necessarily arrive with a UI. To their credit, TC bought it and were courageous enough to consider Fluidinfo further, and to finally accept us. Erick Schonfeld was very thoughtful, supportive, and encouraging in this.

Hopefully the presentation will be available online – if so I’ll post a link here. I’ve been thinking about it and working on it for some time. I’m on stage sometime after 2:15pm (EST) today.

I think it’s going to go well. Hopefully by the time you read this we wont have already been voted off the TC Disrupt island!

We’re very excited to present Tickery: a fun tool for exploring sets of Twitter friends and finding new people to follow.

Tickery starts off very simply, letting you see who pairs of Twitter users follow in common. For example, who do Tim O’Reilly and Tim Bray follow in common? Even simple queries like this are interesting, because they’re a great way to find interesting Twitter users you may want to follow too. In addition, on the Tickery page just below where you enter the two user names, you’ll get to see whether the two users follow each other. So if you find yourself asking “I wonder if X follows Y?” you can use Tickery to find out immediately, which beats scrolling through multiple pages on twitter.com.

Please be patient with Tickery if you do a query on a user we haven’t added yet. Tickery uses the Twitter API to get information about users, and there are restrictions on how fast we can make those API calls.

Tickery lets you sign in via Twitter – see the button on the top right of the tab bar. If you sign in you can filter results to show just the people you’re following (or not), you can click to follow new people, and you can send out tweets with links to Tickery results of interest.

Tickery’s Intermediate tab offers a big jump in power. Enter simple queries using Twitter user names, and simple terms like and, or and except. For example, the query (jack and ev and biz) except terrycojones shows me Twitter users that all the three Twitter founders follow, but who I do not. Or get possible hints on which entrepreneurs are being followed by one firm and missed by another: for example who does everyone at Union Square Ventures follow that no-one at Betaworks does?

Tickery also has an Advanced tab, which gives you another big jump in power. I’ll save a description of that for another post, but to whet your appetite, here are users Tickery knows about with a Twitter id less than 1000 and people I follow on Twitter that I have also met in person. Or see the description and examples in the "huh?" button on the Advanced tab.

Powered by FluidDB

The most important and interesting thing about Tickery is that it’s built on top of FluidDB (description, API). Tickery is great fun all by itself, but it was built to show what we at Fluidinfo think the relationship between applications, their users, and their data will come to look like. That’s also the subject of an upcoming post, but here are a few bullet points to give you an idea of why applications like Tickery, written on top of FluidDB, may look normal but are in fact very different. Such applications, in combination with an information architecture like FluidDB will:

• Leave users in control of their data, which includes letting them use other applications to work on it and, if you’re really serious, being able to turn off access to the application that stored it for you.
• Make the world writable by default, by allowing anyone to add anything to the underlying data in any way they like.
• Selectively protect individual aspects of data objects on a user-by-user and application-by-application basis.
• Allow users and applications to put their name (like an internet domain name) on pieces of data, thereby stamping that data with trust and reputation.
• Let you combine and organize your data, in isolation or with anyone else’s, via search and tagging.
• Let other applications add more data, in a compatible and integrated way, without needing the permission or advance knowledge of the original application.
• Explicitly allow for, and encourage, the flexible evolution of data structure conventions, similar to the way that we see evolution of tagging and hashtags.

You can read about this in the context of Tickery on the About tab.

These are the kinds of ideas that people have recently been writing about as the future of data. For example, see some of these articles: The Future: Operating System And Application-Neutral Data, We need a Wikipedia for data, Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?, Shared data services – the next frontier?, and Robert Scoble’s Twitter to turn on advertising “you will love” (here’s how: SuperTweet). While you’re at it, you might enjoy Scoble’s article The unfundable world-changing startup, which he wrote about Fluidinfo a year ago.

Stay tuned, there’s much more to come. If you’d like to find out how to write programs that can augment and use the data Tickery has stored in FluidDB, have a read of Tickery, for programmers.

Meanwhile, have fun with Tickery! Check back here, or follow me on Twitter for more news on Tickery, FluidDB, and Fluidinfo.

It’s been another long day with a ton of progress.

First off, several more client side libraries were published. We’re now up to seven, written in just 4 days. Today’s additions were .Net and Java. You can see the full list here. These are being produced extremely quickly by a group of people hanging out on IRC.

There are several more projects in the offing. There’s the beginnings of a PHP FluidDB browser by @paparent (sounds like Marbl.es, for those in the know). There’s a very clean and API-faithful Python library coming together from Ali Afshar (here‘s a snippet, putting blood sugar levels onto objects). Nicholas Radcliffe built out his additions to Seo Sanghyeon‘s library to make a set of command-line tools for talking to FluidDB, and then used them to import his 1500+ Delicious tags into FluidDB.

There’s a ton going on, with the #fluiddb channel on IRC. In fact there’s so much going on that we can barely keep up with it. That’s why I’m blogging this at 5am, after about 16 hours of intense FluidDB work. Ross Jones said “Not only has FluidDB got me writing open source code, it is making me blog too – unheard of ” and wrote of FluidDB: “I’ve also heard it called Delicious on steroids, both are pretty accurate.”

We fixed a few FluidDB issues today. We also set up a public bug tracker at http://bugs.fluidinfo.com. And we’ve just set up a sandbox instance of FluidDB at http://sandbox.fluidinfo.com for programmers to fool around in without fear of error. The sandbox is running the latest patches, and these are being confirmed as working by people on #fluiddb. We have about half a dozen more tickets we’d like to close before pushing the changes into the main instance.

We’ve also started to work on a little app of our own, which should offer some pretty nice functionality to enhance one of our favorite web sites… More on that later

Finally, another €10K was sent to the Fluidinfo bank account today by a couple of friends on Twitter, on top of €7K yesterday from a neighbor here. This is really a grassroots effort, in many ways.