Nicholas J. Radcliffe and Nicholas H. Tollervey - Getting Started with Fluidinfo

Both the authors became hooked on Fluidinfo through reading obscure material on the Web by its visionary creator, Terry Jones (@terrycojones).

Nick Radcliffe (@njr) had known Terry from conferences in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they both did PhDs focusing on representation issues in genetic algorithms. They lost contact for over a decade, but then Radcliffe stumbled upon Terrys personal website, which included a set of papers rejected by numerous journals and conferences. These discussed information storage and espoused the view that operating systems and the Internet focus on the wrong organizational structure. The papers mapped out a vision in which, rather than being placed in particular locations, data was simply dropped into a storage system and annotated with metadata in the form of attributes that could be used to search, query, relate, and locate different items. From todays perspective, Terry was describing, before they had really been invented, not just tagging in the sense we are familiar with from Delicious, Flickr, and Gmail, but a more sophisticated version where tags could have values and be queried. He coupled this metadata-driven approach with a focus on search that seems unremarkable today, but which was far from mainstream then. Radcliffe got in touch and has been involved in Fluidinfo and its antecedents since then. After two previous abandoned implementations, Terry sold his flat to fund the creation of what has become Fluidinfo, Inc., that company that builds the Fluidinfo software and runs the Fluidinfo service.

Nicholas Tollervey (@ntoll) first learned of Fluidinfo when Tim OReilly (@timoreilly) addressed the following tweet to Robert Scoble (@scobleizer):

@Scobleizer Have you connected with @terrycojones? I believe hes in Barcelona, doing really interesting work that ought to be on your radar.[]

Nicholas watched and rewatched Scobles four-part video interview with Terry and came to the conclusion that Terry was either mad or on to something . He tracked Terry down and sent him a long email asking for clarification on many aspects of Fluidinfo. He was somewhat surprised, some months later, to receive a detailed and enthusiastic reply from Terry, which also invited him to read the new, very dry Fluidinfo API Reference. Unlikely as it sounds, this confirmed Nicholass hunch that Terry was on to something and he embarked on a series of hacks to explore the capabilities and potential of Fluidinfo. When Fluidinfo gained funding he joined the company as Guy #3.