Twitter update

Twitter, you need to do a better job at communicating with the developer ecosystem that has been formed around your API for the past couple of years.

At least, that’s the message the developers themselves seem to be sending out to the startup at an increasing rate. Jesse Stay from SocialToo wrote something about this earlier today on his blog, criticizing the startup over a change it made to its following limit policy without notifying anyone else prior to the tweak actually being implemented.

Now we’re getting more and more incoming from developers who have noticed that OAuth, an open authorization protocol that Twitter’s been testing in public beta for about a month now, has been “temporarily disabled”. Naturally, Twitter is abuzz with angry and confused third-party application developers, some of which started reporting the fact that oAuth stopped working as early as three days ago. That means some of them have been unable to let new users sign up for quite a while, and although some are saying that Twitter knows about the problem and is working on a fix, silence from the company seems to be the key trend here.

Netbase Update

Regular search engines such as Google and Yahoo use statistics to make sense of the Web. They count links, keywords, and other items on a page to determine its rank in search results. Semantic search engines try to actually understand the meaning of the words found on the Web and other documents to bring back the most relevant results to a query. Microsoft bought Powerset for $100 million to gain semantic search expertise, but so far all it can search is Wikipedia.. Hakia, Textwise, and other startups are also working on semantic search. Now comes NetBase, which brings a slightly different approach that its says can scale to the entire Web.

NetBase has been around for a while. Originally called Accelovation, it has raised $9 million in two rounds of venture funding over the past four years, has 30 employees, and counts among its current customers P&G, Caterpillar, 3M, BP, Kraft, BASF, and Goodyear. It is now changing its name and offering its core semantic indexing technology as a platform for other companies to build their own products. Already, scientific publisher Elsevier uses NetBase to power its Illumin8 research tool for searching scientific articles, patents, and Websites.

NetBase takes a sophisticated linguistic approach, actually diagramming sentences to determine the relationship between words and phrases. It does particularly well with causal relationships, allowing it to tease out cause and effect from raw text. For instance, in the sentence, “The calcium, potassium and magnesium found in yogurt can help reduce your risk for hypertension often resulting from stress, obesity, and other factors” NetBase can identify that “stress” and “obesity” are causes of hypertension and that “calcium,” “potassium,” “magnesium,” and “yogurt” can be used to counter hypertension.

The company has already indexed about 8 billion Web pages and processes 100 billion sentences a month through its semantic parsing. Once it identifies causes, effects, and other relationships, it can serve them up in search results along with top-ranked links. For instance, a health-related search could turn up a guide that includes related symptoms, causes, drugs, and treatments. The technology also lends itself to Q&A types of searches. You could ask, “What companies are developing semantic search technologies?” and it will return a list of companies along with the snippets of mention that company and semantic search.

I’ve tried a few demo searches set up to do various things such as provide the pros and cons of a product, the companies in a particular market, or causes and effects of a medical problem. The results were impressive. On the whole, I’d say they were at least 70 percent relevant, compared to the much larger proportion of irrelevant links I get when I do a Google search. But it was slow. NetBase took 5 seconds or more to return results, something it says won’t be as big an issue in a production versions of its technology.

NetBase is not building its own search engine, although it plans to create a health-related search engine around PubMed content as a proof of concept Instead, it is targeting large publishers and companies that want to create their won vertical search tools, which combine data on the Web with their own databases of content. This is definitely an enterprise play. Licensing starts at about $100,000 and goes up from there.

The Netbook Buzzword

In this day and age, with technology, no one works alone — that’s how Soonr sees it. And it’s a key part of the company’s offering: collaboration. Another is portability, and with the launch of the 3.0 version of its software, Soonr is expanding in both of those areas.

And this update comes complete with an attempt to leverage two of the hottest things out there: the iPhone and netbooks. Soonr launched its iPhone app back in January, and despite supporting some 800 phones, the company still touts that one as a key part of its business. And netbooks are a slightly newer phenomenon that the company is now mentioning as fitting in to what it’s trying to do. Sure, Soonr works on netbooks, just like it works on other computers. But buzz-worthy products aside, the key idea is that you can access your documents from a huge variety of devices, no matter where you are.

And version 3.0 offers some updates. One is called “Projects.” It allows users to better organize specific files together in the cloud. Another new feature is an admin interface so that team leaders can better oversee the collaboration going on. Another lets users send faxes from a mobile device with eFax. There is also support for video playback and a completely revamped UI. But the biggest new feature has to be the search functionality. It promises to work not only on titles of documents on your local machine/phone, but also will search text within documents across the entire network of devices attached to the files in the cloud.

For the first time with the 3.0 release, Soonr is offering a premium version of the product itself. Previously, it offered a free version, and premium versions through various partners. But apparently, it’s moving away from the white labeling idea, and trying to make money by selling the product on its own. For the premium version, prices start at $7.95 a month, but users can add a lot of options for higher fees. If you need it, you can get 2 terabytes of cloud storage for your documents.

I’m a little wary of the buzzwords, but Soonr has a solid product, that simplifies working with documents in the cloud. This looks to be a nice update to it.

LogLogic

LogLogic, a security and log management firm that helps companies sort though log data in their IT systems, has acquired security management company, Exaprotect, for an undisclosed amount. Exaprotect’s software monitors and manages companies’ IT security threats and breaches.

LogLogic, a Sequoia and SAP Ventures-backed private company, offers companies a suite of software products that helps IT departments make sense of logs of IT audits, compliance, and threats, other operational data. Customers can also build their own applications and workflow from LogLogic’s log management software. LogLogic has nearly 800 customers. LogLogic is hoping that this acquisition will help the company edge out competitors RSA, IBM and ArcSight for market share in the security management space.

Exaprotect brings to the table 200 big-name customers, which include Visa, Turner Broadcasting and Apple. And Exaprotect’s security breach prevention and management technology will be added to LogLogic’s roster of IT management services.

LogLogic has received $49.2 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital, SAP Ventures, Focus Ventures, TeleSoft Partners, Worldview Technology Partners and Invesco Private Capital.