Company: Overview
Raw Sugar is somewhat similar to Rollyo, which we profiled yesterday. Raw Sugar basically combines del.icio.us type social bookmarking, with search (of your and other’s bookmarks, along with google results).
Social Bookmarking
You can save a URI found in Raw Sugar Search results, or use a bookmarklet to save any browsed page (support at this time for firefox and explorer only). You can also add a description and tags. Your tags are saved on your user page with a unique URI. This page is also customizable with images, pictures, etc.
For instance, taking someone at random, here is Frank, who is apparently just about to complete a world class bellyflop and likes, among other things, kung fu (if his tags are indicative of his interests). He also likes the Ramones, which is one of my favorite bands (reminds me that I need to create a Ramones station on Pandora).
Search
Raw Sugar offers a nice search service that leverages tagged pages and presents them in search results (keyword and tagged based results look to be mixed, which seems right). They also have a “refine” option after your first search, which further narrows the results set (something Technorati really needs to add).
Given that Del.icio.us recently added search, Raw Sugar may have a long hill to climb.
Overall, it’s a useful service that could use a little jazzing (and ajaxing) up of its user interface. The Raw Sugar blog can be found here.
Team
Ofer Ben-Shachar, CEO and Co-Founder
Frank Smadja, VP Engineering
Monica Laurence, VP Marketing
Additional Reading
BillSaysThis (regarding RSS feed functionality, I looked but can’t find it), Hatch.org, Businessweek, Guy Tavor,
Mike, thanks for taking notice of us. I’d like to clear up a couple of points for you and invite you to send me an email if I can answer any questions.
Most importantly, our search is not the same as del.icio.us and most (though not all) of the other sites in the tagging space–we search the tags, notes and full text of pages saved into our system while del.icio.us, at least for now, only searches tags and, i think, notes.
Second, the RSS is in place but since we’re cleaning up the implementation haven’t explicitly surfaced it yet. You can access the feeds by putting RSS into the right place in the URL. For example, the feed for my collection of resources for our business space is http://www.rawsugar.com/RSS/bi.....evantLinks. (Note that the feed doesn’t validate yet but that’s part of why we have the big Alpha on our site ;).
Regards,
Bill Lazar
Customer Services
Bill, Thank you for taking the time to leave a message. You’re right about the difference in search, in that delicious only searches tags. It’s good to point that out, it’s important. Regarding RSS, thanks for the clarification. I actually spent a lot of time looking for the feeds after reading one of your posts.
You’re welcome. RSS is close (plus a few other interesting features) so please do check back by, well, my boss wouldn’t want me to be too specific. But very, very soon.
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Thanks for the information. This is very useful