Last night, the Silicon Valley Software Development Forum (SDForum) Search SIG held a panel discussion on “Real-time Search” with Gerry Campbell is CEO of the soon-to-be-launched Collecta; Vik Singh, the creator and architect of Yahoo! BOSS; Akhil Wable, engineering search lead at Facebook; and Salim Ismail on behalf of Ångströ, all moderated by Robert Scoble and broadcast live on FriendFeed.

Robert moderated a great discussion that covered a lot of territory. I started off with an insight that we used heavily at PubSub, which is that Real-time search is an oxymoron. Once you take the time to store it, index it and re-present it, it's simply not Real-Time anymore. I've heard the buzzword “Right-time Search” used, which isn’t bad. The key point here is that once you’ve stored information and are “Pulling” it, the real-time aspect is lost. For true Real-Time, we need to utilize a “Push” (or publish/subscribe) approach.

The Push paradigm has been surfacing again and again for over 10 years. The original well-known effort was PointCast. Then, Rohit and Adam Rifkin tried with KnowNow. Following Bob Wyman's vision, we attempted a consumer-facing version with PubSub. None of them were able to stick. The difficulty was trying to encourage ordinary users to figure out what to subscribe to, and finding a killer consumer use-case was tough. That was before Social Networks.

The time for consumer-based Push, is now (pun intended). Your social graph is essentially a large set of latent subscriptions and with the presentation of social gestures in activity streams, the tipping point has been reached. Note that the fastest growing social networks on the web are Facebook and Twitter. Both are essentially Push systems . Facebook’s success is largely due to its activity stream and Twitter is nothing but one big activity stream. And an activity stream is just a set of subscriptions answering the request “tell me whenever my friends do something.”

Towards the end of the panel, I made the analogy (which we also used at PubSub) that the internet is evolving into a complex organism. In this new animal, Search as we know it forms the memory. If you want to know what happened last week, you need a memory. However, if you step on a nail, a memory doesn't serve you. You need a nervous system to tell you to lift your foot.

Across social networks today, activity streams, essentially subscriptions, are forming the basis of social graphs everywhere. Managing and manipulating these is going to provide an extraordinary opportunity going forward.

Now that the eggshell has been cracked, it's a great time to be in real time notification. It's really time to Push!

One of the better descriptions of Twitter I’ve read on their blog likens it to “your own personal wire service.”. So what if we took that concept and ran with it?

Well, if you wanted to follow the latest headlines about the top 100 technology companies in CrunchBase you'd try to locate a Twitter user who obsessively searched for new mentions, sorted out the best sources, and shared the most-relevant stories. That's what you'll get if you follow @CrunchAlerts — except that it's a robot that's automated the entire process...

We're experimenting with this approach to see if users would prefer to see news headlines about the people and companies they work with alongside all of the other conversations streaming in from their online social networks.

We'd appreciate your feedback about concerns such as: Should we have multiple channels, say for each company? Could we use hashtags to make searching easier? Or is it an odd mashup that doesn't “fit” your own personal Zen of Twitter? Let us know by email, our forum, or tweet us at @Angstro.

... since knowing what's wrong with a user interface is the very first step to actually changing things for the better! Since we asked for suggestions last week now that we're actually iterating on our Web application screens, we were overwhelmed with complaints and suggestions, ranging from trivially fixable to catastrophic import gaps.

That request resulted in a lot of email to sort through, which pointed out that the most urgent feature we needed was a better feedback system. We're trying one out from our friends at UserVoice. They've been amazingly frank about blogging their own entrepreneurial journey, too. More »

Until now, Ångströ has focused on news about the people in your professional network. Now we’re delivering news headlines about the most popular company profiles on CrunchBase too! Follow the links to interesting new companies on their popular database of high-tech startups, and you'll find a widget on the right-hand side of the page that displays our latest alerts. We're complementing their existing pointers to stories written by TechCrunch and matching headlines from Techmeme with a wider range of fresher articles from around the Web. More »

Salim and I decided to launch Ångströ to find the needles in the haystacks to stay on top of the news that saturates our professional networks.

We’re serial entrepreneurs — and also investors and writers and managers. In each of those roles, we have to work our professional networks to succeed.

We need to stay on top of who’s funding what, who’s starting something new, who’s making money, and who’s not. It’s not a matter of social gossip; this sort of information is critical to making better business decisions and better professional relationships.

We needed a better way to discover and share the news we needed to know about our colleagues. That’s why we created Ångströ, to discover and share the news you need to know about the people and companies in your professional network. More »