Wow, Ezra Roizen really shows he doesn't get it in that interview. He thinks he's boiled down realtime search to merely an abstraction of existing search. Scoopler (and the entire space) is not a mere rehash of Google and/or Technorati. A) there's core tech here that is fundamentally more difficult than non-realtime search indexing, and B) Twitter Search is only the first example of how realtime search can be valuable.
Jeff Smith of Smule did an admirable job of smacking Ezra down, however. This interview was watchable if only because Jeff made some really salient points about getting to revenue, iterating on products, and not sweating that you don't have absolutely everything figured out.
The key point here is that AJ and team have a product, and they're scrappy, and they're going to do whatever it takes to understand the space and win.
To be clear, I wasn’t comparing the technology of Scoopler to Google or Technorati ( or Kosmix, or the other’s I mention).
I was focused on the challenge of any large-scale search/discovery-based business model. You have to create MASSIVE volume on the consumption side, and then you have to pair it with a business model which can support such a huge platform. In the case of Google it was intent-based advertising, and in the case of Kosmix I guess it trended towards ecommerce (one would assume given their eventual acquisition by Walmart).
The challenge is in the requisite scale of demand, and then the follow-on challenges of monetizing such demand. Thinking more along the lines of companies like Digg who were able to create a great deal of usage, but struggled to monetize (less about tech, and more about business model).
I appreciated then, and now, that real-time search is its own animal. And a very hard problem to solve.
And a much belated congrats to the Scoopler team on being acquired by Google!
Jeff Smith of Smule did an admirable job of smacking Ezra down, however. This interview was watchable if only because Jeff made some really salient points about getting to revenue, iterating on products, and not sweating that you don't have absolutely everything figured out.
The key point here is that AJ and team have a product, and they're scrappy, and they're going to do whatever it takes to understand the space and win.