One of my friends pointed out to the recent news from OneRiot, saying that their business is gaining ground and that they are becoming a big player in real-time search market, here is the original news on TechCrunch:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/18/oneriots-new-realtime-search-api-served-up-with-a-side-of-revenue/Here are some thoughts on this story:
It may seem strange to some people but I do not see any momentum on the OneRiot side, 97%
of their search (momentum) coming from API, and here is the problem: free API search alone is not a good indication of a healthy business model, OneRiot is making high volume free API search calls as the last resort because:
- Consumers don't see much value to their search comparing to Twitter search results.
- OneRiot traffic for the past 6 months is
downward, despite a good coverage by TechCrunch and venture funding.
- Lack of innovation, sticking to very limited sources, I am assuming 90% are Tweets, 8% are Diggs, 2% other posts, no real-time protocols
available for Twitter and many more...
- Businesses use free API when they see lack of consumer demand for their
product in an attempt to win some traffic and some market share. OneRiot
lack of consumer demand shows that they are basically an unsuccessful
business model using the last shot in an attempt to make their product appealing to some
market leaders. A successful business first creates a unique and competitive
product, builds solid consumer demand on top of it and as the demand goes up and to
address the exponential growth creates the API for the partners not VISE
VERSA.
OneRiot is mostly a duplicate work of Twitter trying to pretend a large/important
real-time player ready to be bought. Frankly, I do not see OneRiot (as its current state) to be a real-time
search engine. Their real-time search functionality is Twitter based without
any chance to expose recent developments in real-time search technology
simply because Twitter doesn't support PubSubHubBub or rssCloud protocols. Despite all that RSSMicro is a working example of recent developments in real-time search first introduced by Google and other marker leaders using PubSubHubBub and rssCloud, RSSMicro opens completely new possibilities to a decentralized real-time search, showcasing relevancy and accuracy of the search results by using its proprietary FeedRank algorithm.
Cheers!