

Thingd is building a structured database of every object in the world - freejoe76
http://erlebacher.org/2010/10/08/the-next-big-thingd/

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Groxx
>[signing in]: _It's easy: just connect your Facebook or Twitter account_ [and
no other means]

So "easy" is not allowing me to make a login _not_ tied to everything else.

Anyone with an account care to inform me / us what you can do with an account?
Just like / want it, or add thingds, or...? I'm interested, but the site
contains no info _about_ the site aside from the TOS and privacy policy.

I should really make a throw-away set of accounts on a handful of social
sites, just to get around crap like this. If they allowed straight OAuth or
OpenID instead of _Twitter_ -hosted OAuth, maybe I'd use it. But nobody does
that.

~~~
abraham
Plus they ask for an email address/password during registration which
nullifies any possible gain of a quick registration.

You can unlink any both Facebook and Twitter after registration.

~~~
mike-cardwell
After they've gathered whatever information they can from you by having access
to your Facebook profile or Twitter stream.

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lubos
Joel Spolsky predicted this project 10 years ago :)

"When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes
smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd,
all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and
fine, but don't actually mean anything at all."

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html>

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troymc
Any website or web service with a database of "things" (with attributes) is a
competitor to Thingd: WorldCat, IMDB, gdgt, Google Merchant Center, Zappos,
CNET reviews, Etsy...

Good luck Thingd --- you'll need it!

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rglullis
It's one of those ideas that seem so obvious and that has the potential to
change the world, but it is _highly_ dependent of having critical mass.
Technologically, it is very simple to implement it. One doesn't need much more
than something like CouchDB, and you could have users changing things even
from the admin interface.

With job4dev (shameless plug), we have something very similar, applied to job
listings and company info. We created a "wikipedia for jobs", but lots of the
curating needs to be done by hand. We are automating as much as we can, using
as many APIs as possible, but there's still the need for human involvement.

The problem is, you need to have people _wanting_ to use this. It's the
ultimate chicken-and-egg problem. I could see this working if there is some
sort of incentive, or even if it ties itself to Mechanical Turk. Without that,
it is no different than Freebase, dbpedia, or Aaron's Infogami.

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terra_t
How's this better than Freebase or dbpedia?

~~~
affleck
freebase and dbpedia are tied to wikipedia wiki articles about concepts and
they seem to be trying to do products.. different data domain I don't know
which one is "better" but this seems to have commercial tie-ins where
wikipedia might not.

~~~
rictic
Freebase was seeded with Wikipedia, but we're always loading data from new
license compatible sources. We've got books from Stanford Library, music from
MusicBrainz, films from Netflix, and a lot more.

We don't have good coverage of product data right now though.

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dirtyaura
Thinglink ( <http://thinglink.com> ) has tried several approaches in this
space. Originally they offered this very abstract kind of "URL for things"
service, then they pivoted to be more a social network around things, then
they pivoted to be a social network for designers and people who like designer
clothes and other designer objects.

Now, their final pivot was in my opinion marvelous, as it went to very basics
and offered a super-simple service to tag things in photographs. It's still
operating in a same space "to URLify real world objects", but it offers an
immediately useful service, for example for fashion bloggers.

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stcredzero
This reminds me of Bruce Sterling's "Internet of Things."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things>

[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3857739359956666768...](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3857739359956666768#)

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jasonjei
At the very heart of it, it could map every object to its BOM including carbon
based lifeforms. Imagine if every object were a class, including humans. The
atom could be a basic super class, and you could map out various dependencies
and object superclasses (e.g, Oxygen < Atom < Base). And it might even work
with non physical things (Capitalism < EconomicTheories).

~~~
Raphael
Does it support multiple inheritance? For example, water is made up of two
elements.

~~~
gnaritas
Water is _composed_ of two elements, nature, like good programmers, prefers
composition to inheritance.

~~~
nl
I have both a Mother and a Father.

Obviously nature has a bit left to learn.

~~~
gnaritas
No, there's a time and place for inheritance, just not as often as
composition.

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praeclarum
All these tags mean the same thing to me.

3.75 inches 3.75 inches tall 3.75 x 3.75 x 5.75 inches 3.75 x 4.5 x 7 inches

The problem with human entered / non moderated data is that these lists will
become longer and longer over time and the database will not understand that
they all mean the same thing. Joins will be impossible and its relevance
fades.

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rxin
Isn't this what semantic web is about?

~~~
rfugger
And equally impossible to do in a way that is globally useful.

~~~
edwincheese
I still believed (or hope) that semantic web is the future of Internet.

If a very particular industry willing to open up their data in standard and
extensible format (may be RDF or a simpler standard), like film theater
listing their showtimes or governments release their statistical data in RDF
rather than Excel only, many useful application could be developed on it and
it is a big step towards semantic web already. And I think it is not too hard
to do.

~~~
terra_t
If RDF's got a problem it's that it's too simple, at least in terms of the
functionality it's offered.

It's complicated as hell to do simple things in RDF, but that's a different
issue, not the one I struggle with every day.

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derefr
If they don't stop at just describing the _semantic_ knowledge that a person
would derive from the experience of objects, but instead also include the
_process_ knowledge—in a rigorous, possibly _algorithmic_ form—then it would
be the world's biggest MOO.

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ntoll
This is very similar to FluidDB (Fluidinfo, the creators of FluidDB have
recently closed series A funding with some great backers).

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spoon16
How does this compare to Freebase?

~~~
affleck
freebase is structured wikipedia (concepts) this thingd looks more like
structured ebay (objects)

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LordLandon
If only 5th Cell released Objectnaut, they'd have a great start!

