There’s no shortage of real-time search engines that are tracking the web and social media sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook for results. Collecta, OneRiot, Microsoft’s Bing and Google all offer compelling search engines to tap into the real-time stream. Today, social media client Sobees is jumping into the stream with its real-time search discovery platform.
The platform, which is powered by Microsoft Silverlight and runs on top of Windows Azure, has the look and feel of Sobees’ Twitter client. Within the page, the search offering aggregates searches by categories in five columns or modules including real-time search (Twitter, Friendfeed, Facterylabs and OneRiot), image search (Bing, Flickr, Google and Yahoo), video search (Bing, Google and Youtube), web search (Bing, Google and Yahoo) and news search (Bing, Google, New York Times and Yahoo).
For each column, the user can filter results by choosing to click off services, or click off columns all together. You can also choose to search from trending topics pulled from Twitter and Yahoo that are updated in real-time. While the engine is a standalone sight, it will soon be included in Sobees’ Twitter client as well. The real-time search platform is fairly innovative and could be a good companion to the the client
Although the third-party social media application space is crowded, Sobees seems to be doing well for itself. Its client, which has a Windows native desktop app built in .NET and a web application built off of Microsoft Silverlight, integrates Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and LinkedIn. The startup recently struck a deal with Yahoo in December to integrate the client in Yahoo Mail in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain (the application is called “My Social Networks”).
Sobees will also be launching a native Android Twitter client which has support for multiple Twitter accounts, Twitter search, geolocation, lists and most of the basic Twitter functionality. A native iPhone app is in the pipeline. I’m a fan of Sobees and find myself wishing the startup offered a mac-client.