The crunchies are here and we are right in it. After all the ups and downs of product development we have got the product in some shape( I think we could do lot better) where we can start getting feedback on our new real time collaboration platform Same Page. This is not the real time collaboration application that one would expect doing video conferencing ,blah and etc. This is a very lightweight platform that can be extended with newer applications. The idea is that there is a lot of productivity that can happen using simple ,small and targetted applications by throwing them all into a real time collaborative paradigm.
We are using plain ole Javascript and the server push technology which recently got rechristened as comet. We have used python and twisted for our serverside. Other client side technologies (flash , silverlight) can be exploited but they are in our list of “coming soonz”.
The apps that we have right now are pretty basic but we are working hard to add more. I personally like the note taking and task management applications that we currently have. Its a major departure from the prevading approach to task management and capturing notes during conversations. But then its a new way therefore I am keen to know what the users think. We have also introduced a new concept called “Gestures” which would infact be completely new to real time collaborative platforms. We have tried to incorporate the same non verbal communication pattern that exists among humans to applications. Although the implementation is currently basic, this would start manifesting in a big way helping our users get on the samepage intuitively. More on gestures later..
I have been reading a lot about the pitfalls of product development. It is so easy to loose track of the users. We just swerved through that and I think the best way forward for us would be just put it out there and brace ourselves for the feedback. May be the product would be trashed by a few .. may be it will appreciated by a few .. maybe it wouldn’t be understood at all. But I guess its better to find it out now than later.
The ability to scale up has been one of the main concerns that I have had for a while. Its time that we have been running out off but we finally decided to experiment a private beta approach where we could slow down the number new of users hopping on board so that it will give us time to scale. The application cannot be scaled horizontally easily as we have live user networks whose presence information we utilize in our applications but I guess I have my task cut out.
Finally here is the listing of the company on crunchbase. I will give an update soon about the event and the kind of user traction that we have begun to get on the site.
Try searching for “Web Designer” on google. I did that yesterday as I was searching for a good freelancing designer on the web. It gave me the following results
More than half of the results were not relevant for me. What other possible meaning could such a query mean other than looking for a “web designer”? A significant number of users would use that query with the expectation that the results would be a list of top web designers. I have been noticing this need repeating in many of my searches and not exactly limited to the above query.
So .. Is there a different way that we can get a system to understand what we really mean than to play around with ‘keywords’ to obtain the relevant results and fool the rankings?. Here is an attempt.
Consider del.icio.us. Its a community approach at organizing the web( in whatever form ). “Tags” have become the way to organize the web and tagging can enable a user to create keywords to remember a link with. So what pages would be tagged “web designer”?
Here is the result:
7 results - pointing to web designers website
2 results - pointing to resources for designers
1 result - pointing to something random
Voila! .. its so much better. But they still are not my top 10 lists but they definitely are more relavant. But the above approach has a significant limitation. It depends upon people to find the page and tag it else the page cannot be found. This cannot happen for the zillion other pages in the world.
Now, in reality different people tag pages in different ways with certain common keywords. In effect they give a personality to those pages by choosing a bunch of words. So what we end up with is a bunch of personalities for a page just like humans. This is similar to an individual’s take on what kind of “personality” another possesses. Each person’s take might differ and may have something in common.
This got me to start wondering about the possibilities of using an “Artificially intelligent” way to tag the web. But if you have a robot figuring out a way to tag information then it would end up associating a particular personality to a page which might be robotic in nature :). But then lets say we could somehow create different ontological descriptions for the same page with these robots. Apply page rank or Personality Rank (TM - I need to figure this out still ;)) relevance on this and I bet we will have better search results.
Now .. I will go figure out my robot and Personality Rank(TM). If you have any ideas please shoot :).
Websites do have a personality .. dont they. That was what struck me today when I read an article about semantic web. Lately,I have been trying to get uptodate about this new approach towards redesigning the web.
There are personal sites,corporate sites, services on the web. What would happen if they can talk to each other? Strange things can emerge. For example lets say .. my blog site can talk to a another blog site …say Harsha’s ..It could find that it had certain similar traits like topics posted on,blogging habits etc. Or may be a product offering on a site can be ontologically matched with a requirement somewhere on the web. I wonder the possibilities that can emerge from such a simple “ability to talk”…. … still dreamin abt it :).
The crunchies are here and we are right in it. After all the ups and downs of product development we have got the product in some shape( I think we could do lot better) where we can start getting feedback on our new real time collaboration platform Same Page. This is not the real time collaboration application that one would expect doing video conferencing ,blah and etc. This is a very lightweight platform that can be extended with newer applications. The idea is that there is a lot of productivity that can happen using simple ,small and targetted applications by throwing them all into a real time collaborative paradigm.