Yesterday's Mercury News had an interesting article about a number of new search / tagging services that are combining simple search with the ability to save the results including notes and share them with others. See the article by Matt Marshall here.
Ben Elgin from BusinessWeek also writes about a Search Engine for Every Subject.
I took a look at two of the services, Jeteye and Kaboodle. As a long time user of del.icio.us I immediately understood the value.
There are number of new services like this stemming from the problem we all have in storing interesting information and then being able to retrieve it later. Kaboodle was created by Manish Chandra because he had trouble surfing the web for items he needed in refurbishing his home. Del.icio.us was created by Joshua Schachter because he was frustrated with the inadequacy of browser bookmarketing. Flickr's Caterina Fake brought the power of tagging to photos. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Side note, both del.icio.us and Flickr have been acquired by Yahoo.
Of course we all understand this problem of find things and then wanting to make use of them later. It isn't just on-line information. Remember the last time you read an article put it down and now can't find it. Or hanging your pictures, you put down your hammer and now - where the heck is it? Or you put that important document in your filling cabinet and now you can't remember which folder.
Tagging helps with this because you can put any number of tags on the same item. This means however you are thinking of a particular item the moment you are looking for it you are much more likely to find it.
But there needs to be more than just tagging, and saving. As we move to Singularity we need to transition from searching to watching, finding to notification and have it all integrated into our immediate context and location.
How about combining Jeteye, Del.icio.us, PubSub, Rrove and Watson into a single service that works from wherever you are.
Stay tuned for more.
From the Desk
Richard Treadway
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