A smarter net?

Saturday, April 14, 2007 by Dave Winer.

On Twitter, earlier today I saw that Jason Calacanis was in Barcelona. Hmmm, I thought, I wonder what he's doing there.  

A few hours later, I see that Jeff Barr is in JFK waiting for a flight to Barcelona. 

Okay, now I know something is up. So I ask Jeff, and he sends a pointer to a conference he's going to. I'm sure Jason is going there too. 

Now I wonder, who else in my network will be there? 

And of course I'd like to have been alerted of this coincidence two weeks ago, so I could have planned a trip myself. While the conference doesn't look that awesome (do they ever?) I've never been to Barcelona, and here's an excuse to party with people in my network in a new city. And a trip to Europe would be interesting right about now.  

Someday, probably not too far down the road, our nets will be smart enough to make these connections for us. All we need is a few hooks and a data interchange standard or two, or enough motivation to enter our data into a new app. Maybe there would be enough of a payoff. 

Disclaimer: I invested in Confabb thinking they might solve this problem.