John Battelle's Search Blog

And the Top Ten are (with last year’s ranking in parens):

1. KaZaA (2)
2. Britney Spears (4)
3. Dragonball (1)
4. Paris Hilton (-)
5. IRS (7)
6. Kobe Bryant (-)
7. Christmas (9)
8. NFL (6)
9. Pamela Anderson (10)
10. Brooke Burke (34)

Meanwhile, I see the folks behind this are RealContacts and SLI Systems. SLI is the tech that was behind Snap!, and survived it (and now powers some portions of the NBC webspace).

I can’t tell is this is simply silly – take the hottest stuff on the web right now and combine it! – or for real. More when I get smarter.

In any case the party was quite subdued by usual product hype standards, with an odd assortment of well-to-do investor types wandering shoeless through an extraordinary Mill Valley home, and Bonnie Raitt also in attendance (Bonnie Raitt?!), sporting a very down-to-earth and pleased-to-be-here manner. Groxis CEO RJ Pittman gave me a demo. Grokker takes datasets created by a keyword or phrase queries on sites like Amazon or “the Web” (it hits six search engines) and runs them through a second filter which displays results as clusters of nested orbs, each with tags derived on the fly from the data. It’s quite a seductive interface, and I can see it working for any number of search needs. And as a trend, I applaud this kind of development – building new applications based on search as a platform, rather like an OS. (Tim Bray among others have noted in the past how search today seems stuck at the level of the DOS C: prompt. Groxis might be seen as an attempt to go GUI.)

But the most interesting thing about Groxis is how it is approaching versioning – this release comes after more than a year out in the open, soliciting feedback (some of it quite negative) from the search community. With Version 2.0, Groxis plans to again listen and learn from how the product is used, rather than try to force it into a particular bucket of revenue (though they do have enterprise and licensing deals). This is due to the angel investors behind the company, Pittman said, who are not demanding a rigid, pre-determined approach to how the product will make money. That was exactly how Google did it in the beginning (and, it seems, how Friendster is doing it now). The Mac version will be ready to beta in a few weeks. When I get it, I’ll post more.

The problem with this, as I’ve ranted before (in a previous 2.0 column that I swear I am about two days from posting here), is that while TiVo puts its intelligence at the edge of the cable network, ostensibly under your control, the cable company boxes have opaque, client-server architectures, owned and controlled by the cable system. In other words, they decide what you can fast forward, record, cut and paste (well, you can’t do that anyway), etc. It’s a terrible, closed system, and because cable companies are monopolies, for the most part, there’s not much to be done about it. It’s Larry Lessig’s worst nightmare (and mine too).

And how might the cable companies handle their newly found control over your PVR? Well, here’s a hint from Tom Rutledge, president of cable operations for Cablevision: “We didn’t think it was a good idea (to add PVRs to the system) and didn’t want to do it,” Rutledge said. In other words, we are with the MPAA and the content industry on this one, and are only doing this because the market is asking for it. Endgame: If you get a cable PVR, expect the keys to be in someone else’s hands. My suggestion: go satellite and buy a TiVo. This year might be your last chance.