PubSub is certainly more well known for its self-induced implosion last year than for the product itself. The company developed what they called a “future search engine” that allowed users to type in keywords and get blog and other RSS-enabled news back as it was published.
It was a good idea, and one emulated by most of the blog search engines over time. But the company’s founders, Bob Wyman and Salim Ismail, never got along and their private disputes eventually turned very public. Ismail left the company after a power struggle, a merger with KnowNow fell apart and the company shut down. Even after that, Wyman kept swiping at Ismail on his blog.
Today, Ismail and Wyman have moved on. Ismail heads up Yahoo Brickhouse, a new semi-autonomous business unit to foster new product development within Yahoo. Wyman works for Google on an internal project known, intriguingly, as PubSub as well.
I thought we’d heard the last of PubSub. But today Ian Bell emailed to say that the company is in the process of relaunching – and sure enough a new home page is up. Bell says that PubSub’s investors, who took over the company after a controversial recapitalization which left some of the minority stockholders steaming, have sold most of the assets to his startup, along with $1 million in fresh capital. He’s now in charge of PubSub.
Bell says they’ll relaunch PubSub in six months or so as a “consumer friendly version of Yahoo Pipes.” Since he won’t say any more right now, we’re left speculating exactly what that will be and how PubSub’s technology fits into it. In the meantime, he says, they’ll be launching a Facebook application in the next month that directly uses PubSub’s matching engine. You tell the application what you like and it will deliver relevant news and information to you on the subject.
Just Don’t Look Under The Carpet
All of the bad blood created with the original PubSub saga hasn’t completely settled yet. The minority shareholders, we hear, are very upset about the way Polygon Capital handled the KnowNow merger discussions and eventual winding down of the company. In the end, Polygon and their associates supposedly owned all of the assets of the company, leaving the founders and minority stockholders with nothing. Polygon never settled the matter with them, and there was little reason to sue given that the company was in limbo. But if the new PubSub is successful there could suddenly be a pot of money to go after, and that could spark new litigation interest from the old shareholders.
Whatever happens, the drama is likely to continue. And all that attention, Bell says, is “great PR” for his new startup.
Update: Bell says below that I misquote him slightly in the last paragraph above, which is highly likely given my poor listening skills. I take misquotes seriously because what really matters (usually) is what someone meant to say, not what they actually said. In this case, it may have been neither. Apologies.
Here’s my future search term: pubsub + deadpool
Well, I guess if what Truemors got can be considered good PR, so can this. Zany world.
Isn’t that what Google Alerts are for?
This is an interesting study in the do’s and don’t s of blogging. It was a savage exchange between the two that took a bang on idea and I had thought killed it. This still has entertainment value left …… it is like a volcano ….it could erupt….or it might not …… cheers scott
just let it die already and move on….
It would seem to me just by reading the above that there is so much drama going on and how that can be good PR is beyond me.
I mean no disrespect to Michael, as this is a well-researched piece written in a very short time, but it’s a bit of a misquote .. I had said that the cachet and notoriety of PubSub made for great PR, made it easy to open doors.
The bitterness between Bob & Salim, Bob & others, is water under the bridge. As for the band of angel investors who by most accounts I’ve heard blocked any future for the company while expecting other investors to continue to buck up — what did they expect would happen?
There’s great technology and some good ideas, but PubSub never figured out what business they’re in. We have the advantage of hindsight, some vision around consumer marketing, and the talent to execute well.
So I’ll take odds on that dead pool. =)
My advice about PubSub: Find a product that consumers can actually use. During my time at PubSub I constantly struggled to find uses for the product myself. No one there could really explain to me what the real benefit of the service was. Honestly I didn’t ask a lot of questions because I needed the paycheck (which eventually disappeared anyway).
I think the strength of PubSub, as it was explained to me, was “up to the minute information”. But the more I thought about it, the less I could find uses for it. They had RSS based information about earthquakes and air travel delays. But you couldn’t access the site from a mobile so the air traffic delays didn’t do me a ton of good unless I was sitting there refreshing the page before I left for the airport. I still have no idea why you would need up to the second information about earthquakes unless you’re doing some kind of geological research.
It seemed as if everyone there was committed to a technology or a concept with no clear idea how the average person would use it. I hope, Ian, that in this latest incarnation you have a clear plan to deliver a useful and relevant product (and not just a facebook app).
#8 excellent comment. I hope this time around PubSub will make it.
Hi #8,
I doubt you were an ex-pubsub employee, because you forgot the airport delay and earthquake notification can be received via email and xmpp. I monitored the PubSub internal system via XMPP for its latency, which I implemented it. And PubSub had a Firefox extension and an IE sidebar to see notifications done by Duncan Werner and Malcolm Pollack, respectively. PubSub did not do mobile, which is a flop then in my own opinion. I remembered one reason, if Bob Wyman read it and liked to correct my misquote, then for not doing mobile is before we implemented a way to reduce duplicate and unnecessary messages, we should not tap onto sms or other network to make telcom guys upset. Surprised, it is the same excuse as Steve Jobs for Apple’s iPhone. But I think the infrastructure of mobile data message is better than 2004/2005, so PubSub v2 may work this time.
I am not working on a project called “PubSub” nor one that has “PubSub” anywhere in its name. Others here may have projects with pubsub in their name, but not me.
bob wyman
What is really ironic about this thread is that the TechCrunch sponsor iJ.am, (look to the right of this piece at the “Get Your TechCrunch Vortex now), does what PubSub “did” but in a more personal, accurate, and exhaustive service offering than PubSub ever did. Its available currently (and works with mobile too) and in a much friendlier form factor. Check out the iJ.am service, you can’t miss it, look to the right and up, and you’ll wonder why PubSub ever mattered.
A consumer Yahoo Pipes would be nice.
This is a very great news !
I hope they’ll develop an XMPP PubSub (J2ME & S60) mobile client.
Go PubSub !