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Profile – PubSub

Michael Arrington

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J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Tuesday, June 14th, 2005
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Company: PubSub

Location: New York

Launched: February 9, 2004

What is it?

PubSub, which is short for “publish and subscribe”, is a future search engine. It’s also called “persistent search”. Users input keywords on subjects that they are interested in. The keywords are stored, or “persistent”. PubSub’s matching engine compares these stored/persistent queries against newly-discovered pages on an ongoing basis, in real time.

What this means: If you would like to be notified of websites that post about subjects you are interested in, you input the search terms, and PubSub will notifiy you as posts appear that include your keywords. A great (necessary, really) feature is the ability to store any persistent search and view it via RSS in your favorite reader. At TechCrunch, for instance, we have stored search terms like “Web 2.0″ and are notified in our RSS reader of all new posts or articles that include the term “Web 2.0″.

People generally refer to what PubSub does as either persistent search or future search, whereas regular search engines like Google are refered to as retrospective search. Persistent search notifies you of future content as it is created. Retrospective search engines help you find content that is already out there on the web.

If you find it hard to get your mind around this, try it out, and make sure you take the RSS feed from your subscription so that you don’t have to go back to the site to check and see if there are any new results. As the alerts start rolling in to your RSS reader, you will be very pleasantly surprised.

PubSub is also very strongly behind a structured blogging initiative which helps bloggers structure topic-specific posts like reviews (books, music, etc.) and events. A wordpress plugin is available at structuredblogging.org, that we use here at TechCrunch as well as on our personal blogs.

We like pubsub and have many, many subscriptions to keep us up to date on topics that interest us. As an example, here is the RSS feed for our subscription to “web2.0 and web 2.0″ (where we seem to consistently find great posts from a blog called the Read/Write Web, the second best Web 2.0 blog on the net :-) .

Key Features:

- Future or Persistent search at lightning-fast speeds (subject only to RSS time limitations)
- web based
- IE or Firefox client option – see screen shot #3
- Great user interfact

Screen Shots:




Management:

Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder
Salim Ismail, CEO and co-founder
Richard Treadway, CMO
Link

Relevant Links:

press
media coverage
about pubsub
Bob Wyman’s Blog
John Battelle on PubSub
Charlene Li on Pubsub

Tags:
  • rbk

    What about a CRM for small businesses in this new web2.0 social networking era to keep them better connected? That would be nice for the almost 6million small businesses in the USA.

    Thanks for the article Steve, Yay techCrunchIT! :)

  • Paul

    I’m very excited about TechCrunchIT, but I hope the length of this piece isn’t a sign of what’s to come.

    Keep ‘em short and sweet!

  • http://www.mbainsurance.net Kevin

    I agree with Paul. I enjoyed that initial post. But my gosh that was fast and furious.

  • anthropocentric

    Too long, not enough images and links throughout the article, making it seem heavy.

  • DNS ATTACK

    I consider myself as well read as anyone else, but with the length of these posts you have to just skip to the videos instead

  • mimi

    @rbk – that is what salesforce.com is – over 80% of their customers have less than 20 users. The other good (better/cheaper) alternative is Oracle’s Siebel OnDemand.

    Re: the length of the article, that is not so much of an issue. The issue is lack of clarity. Bear in mind that the readers of an enterprise blog are often mgt types from corporate IT departments, so clarity is king. Get to the point quickly. Bullet points are your friend.

    I would have liked to forward this article to my manager (CIO) as we are looking into salesforce.com. As it is written, I’d need to rewrite the whole thing in order to do this.

  • Steven

    I like the length the more is better if you are working in this sphere. This app they demo looks so much like salesforce’s ui that to me it turns me off to even considering using their service.

  • http://et.cairene.net Robert W. Anderson

    Note to those trying to “help” Steve with his writing:

    1. Commenting on Steve’s writing style has jumped the shark. It became passe last century.
    2. Steve Gillmor has been writing about IT since before a lot of you were born. His style is working.
    3. You are not adding any value. None.

    @mimi: either you need a new CIO or you have misjudged him/her.

    Pre-emptive note to self: engaging with trolls isn’t adding any value either.

  • Ryan

    The big issue with the platforms and adoption in the corporate environment will be security and data privacy. I’m with a mid-size company and we offer some web portals and Saas type apps, but we’re stuck running through SAS70 reviews, security audits from each client, etc. Can these platform providers provide us that level? Will they answer my client’s questions about their SAS70 audits?…

  • Graciela Ramsey

    rrc6dgjpicppnv7x

  • http://ctroutelu.ru/ irolatRomourl

    Нормуль, читать можно.

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