Like most of the good applications we see, it was created not from a spreadsheet but from the need to solve a problem. In this case, Canadian Ian Bell (founder of the new and improved PubSub) came up with the idea when he got tired of reading through email strings about upcoming games for his hockey teams.

In an email, Ian wrote “Lots of companies vying for domination in this space. My approach is to focus on the core value and really get good at solving the pain most people have around organizing their teams, and not worry about all the other big-ticket aspects such as photo sharing, scorekeeping, etc. Other companies are good at that but they’re mired in the process of making big sales to leagues, etc. I’m hoping I can make the appeal directly to teams, which is far less costly and more viral.”

RosterBot works for any sport, and it takes about a minute to get the team set up and invitations sent out. If you are on or coach a team that can use this, you’ll love it. Otherwise, move on, nothing to see here.

So Ian, when’s the new PubSub launching, anyway?

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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.

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He says the problems were not that the company lacked killer technology or great employees, but instead lays the blame squarely at the feet of ex-CEO and co-founder Salim Ismail. Bob trashes Salim quite publicly:

What has prevented us moving forward is a battle with a group of minority shareholders, some of whom claim to be lead by our ex-CEO Salim Ismail and are, in any case, primarily his “friends and family.” This group is using very unusual clauses in our Shareholder’s agreements to block mergers or financings. We’ve found it difficult to determine their motives, however, some have said that they believe that it is in their interest to drive the company into bankruptcy so that they can buy our software and start a new company.

Now I certainly don’t have the full story and Bob may or may not be correct. But there are plenty of people out there who say Bob was the problem, not Salim, or that the two of them together were a disaster. Regardless of who’s right, Bob was wrong today. A founder should never try to solve problems by publicly attacking another founder. Who’s going to step in now and fund or buy the company with all of this incredibly immature drama being thrown about?

What a waste.

Pubsub ousted founding CEO Salim Ismail in March after losing a power struggle with co-founder Bob Wyman. Constantine Gus Spathis took over as CEO before Salim’s announced departure.

Update: I made some corrections to the above post after Bob Wyman responded by comment below.

There are four lists currently and my understanding is that they plan to expand the number greatly in the near future. The current Lists:

• The Law List
• The PR List
• The Fashion List
• The Librarian List

The feeds from each list are availabe in opml format, and they’ve created an aggregate RSS feed for each list as well.

This is a great example of Reading Lists – edited, dymanic opml feed lists. It can also be compared to Technorati’s Blog Finder, which ranks related feeds as well. The difference is that Technorati relies on publisher tags to determine content topic for a blog, whereas Pubsub relies on a human expert to determine which feeds should be included.

See Library Stuff for more information. Steven Cohen, who writes Library Stuff, is PubSub’s Senior Librarian.

Zvents

My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff.

KnowNow

Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week.

Orb

Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though.

Wink

Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”.

Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow.

Allpeers

Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently.

Flock

Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again.

But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week.

PubSub

Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here.

The PubSub LinkRanks 1000 is a list of the most consistently influential sites that publish feeds, based on their average LinkRank scores over the past 30 days. To create this list, we’ve averaged the daily LinkRanks of over 16 million sources. We’ve also included a 15-day average as well as each site’s current LinkRank as additional points of comparison.

PubSub also says “LinkRanks is PubSub’s method of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in over 16 million sources that PubSub monitors.”

Robert Scoble says “Ahh, more fun with blog search ahead!”

The lists includes 15 and 30 day trailing data for each blog, current rank and percentile and a link to site stats (example – techcrunch).

Location: New York

Launched: February 9, 2004

What is it?

PubSub, which is short for “publish and subscribe”, is a future search engine. It’s also called “persistent search”. Users input keywords on subjects that they are interested in. The keywords are stored, or “persistent”. PubSub’s matching engine compares these stored/persistent queries against newly-discovered pages on an ongoing basis, in real time.

What this means: If you would like to be notified of websites that post about subjects you are interested in, you input the search terms, and PubSub will notifiy you as posts appear that include your keywords. A great (necessary, really) feature is the ability to store any persistent search and view it via RSS in your favorite reader. At TechCrunch, for instance, we have stored search terms like “Web 2.0″ and are notified in our RSS reader of all new posts or articles that include the term “Web 2.0″.

People generally refer to what PubSub does as either persistent search or future search, whereas regular search engines like Google are refered to as retrospective search. Persistent search notifies you of future content as it is created. Retrospective search engines help you find content that is already out there on the web.

If you find it hard to get your mind around this, try it out, and make sure you take the RSS feed from your subscription so that you don’t have to go back to the site to check and see if there are any new results. As the alerts start rolling in to your RSS reader, you will be very pleasantly surprised.

PubSub is also very strongly behind a structured blogging initiative which helps bloggers structure topic-specific posts like reviews (books, music, etc.) and events. A wordpress plugin is available at structuredblogging.org, that we use here at TechCrunch as well as on our personal blogs.

We like pubsub and have many, many subscriptions to keep us up to date on topics that interest us. As an example, here is the RSS feed for our subscription to “web2.0 and web 2.0″ (where we seem to consistently find great posts from a blog called the Read/Write Web, the second best Web 2.0 blog on the net .

Key Features:

- Future or Persistent search at lightning-fast speeds (subject only to RSS time limitations)
- web based
- IE or Firefox client option – see screen shot #3
- Great user interfact

Screen Shots:

Management:

Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder
Salim Ismail, CEO and co-founder
Richard Treadway, CMO
Link

Relevant Links:

press
media coverage
about pubsub
Bob Wyman’s Blog
John Battelle on PubSub
Charlene Li on Pubsub