Rumors about Palo Alto based stealth startup Goop have been buzzing for weeks now. A standard landing page accepting email submissions for beta testing is now up, and some information has been leaked about the company.
CEO Peter Gibbons (previously at Initech, a TPS automation company) gave me a walk through of the product earlier today, April 1, 2006. Goop certainly has the next generation web 2.0 features needed to compete with the more established players. And the whopping $30 million financing from prominent angel investor Josh Kopelman should give it enough staying power to attract the 20,000 or so email addresses it needs to be acquired by one of the big guys.
The core feature set includes a fully interactive 3D social tagging environment, first rate cut and paste bookmarklets, and with an Ajax/Flash rich interface with rounded corners and easy-on-the-eyes pastels. Also, RSS feeds are available for all FAQs.
The most interesting aspects of the service, however, are a number of del.icio.us/flickr-like features to allow anyone to create their own topic-based version of the main service, create a mashup with any XUL or LUX interface and prominently display the results to users on a Soap based platform with fully closed APIs. At this time, the service is available for download on the Mac platform only, using the Internet Explorer browser. Sign up for the closed beta here. Goop is a winner.
Update: This is my favorite so far today.