A while back I was reading up on, and thinking about realtime search. At the time, I was struggling to see how realtime snapshots of the ‘Internet’s consciousness’ from sites like Scoopler, Tweetmeme and OneRiot (among many others) provided much utility. Sure, it was interesting, but short of stock trades, GPS navigation and a few other uses I couldn’t see much real value.
Then I read somewhere (wish I could remember) someone saying the real application might be as an alarm clock. What if companies, celebrities, governments, police, etc. used realtime search like a security camera, not to search, but to monitor? I’m sure the CIA already does, but for those of us without a Jack Bauer-pimped iPhone such a service might be useful.
I envision a service closer to the alert system pimped by Ben Stein for FreeCreditReport.com. Though I’d not try to fool people into thinking its free.
For a nominal fee (like 50¢/month) I’d offer a profiler. The user could enter their primary brand name and then for each additional iteration, perhaps I’d charge another 25¢. Make it cheap. Make it a volume play in terms of revenue. The user could also set a chatter threshold (assuming we’re all mentioned a little online all the time) as well as primary sites to focus on. Perhaps there’s even a sentiment engine that offer’s an overall favorability score. All of these could be add-ons to the monthly nut, offering incremental revenue but keeping the cost less than a latte/month.
When the user’s brand(s) is mentioned, s/he gets an alert in their channel of choice (SMS, IM, Twitter, email, all of the above, etc.). Then said user can log in, see a realtime report of their mentions, as they happen, and choose how to engage in the conversation.
Google and Yahoo have these systems in place, but they are not in realtime. There are other options too, but they all seem to require manual intervention (aka, that I go to the site and type in a search term). An automated monitoring system seems very useful to me. My guess is, someone is working on it. If not, and you read this, and make millions, don’t forget the little people you read on the way up.
This is something I thought would be a great idea back in the late 90′s. No one was doing it then, and fast forward 10 years to the present and still no one is doing it quite like the way I envisioned it or as you described. A real-time search across the web for a brand still remains fraught with many technical obstacles, but the ever-growing social media scene makes this a much more feasible and viable option now.
Maybe we should talk about developing such a site?
Once upon a time I even had, what I thought, were the perfect domain names this service: idwatch.com and idprotect.com. However, after holding on to them for years, I eventually gave in and sold them when a serious offer was made. Oddly, enough, the offer was from Naveen Jain, founder of InfoSpace and Intelius.