Updated: 9/1/02; 2:15:57 PM.
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Saturday, August 3, 2002

Ok, so it's six months later and still there's no product from Opencola, the company aiming to wed P2P networks with search engine technology (the one thing definitely lacking in most Limewire-esque products). But this week, the company appears to be gearing up for the launch with a new site and a slew of promotional materials. The beta appears close as well; you can sign up for potential inclusion.

To give you an inkling of why folks are raving about this, here's a quote from Opencola on something called Associative Searches.

Opencola is designed to recognize synergies between peers and documents with our associative searching capability. With associative searching, Opencola will automatically refer items to you from peers, even though the content may not be something you've specifically searched for, if you and those peers demonstrate a pattern of similar relevant files in your folders.

Of course, this could help harness the knowledge locked inside of each user within an organization. Imagine having your search tool tell you that the monthly sales numbers have just been completed by Fred in accounting...all without Fred having to post said numbers. Still, I sense two issues with this software.

First, the signal to noise ratio will be very hard to beat. I'm sorry, but relying upon a wide array of so called peers to find new informational opportunities sounds about as useful as those "Listmania" catalogues on Amazon.com. Second, like TiVo and KaZaA, the opportunity to sell out is just too great.

Posted by Brad Shimmin at 12:16:11 AM   comment on this post  >>[]


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