A long time ago there was an interesting little startup named PubSub that provided prospective search. Back in my past life, I definitely had a thing for PubSub. And I especially enjoyed Bob Wyman’s blogging before he finally tailed off after PubSub crashed.
I had heard that he’d migrated to Google, but wasn’t really sure what he was up to. Can’t say as I do know now, but Wyman popped up recently in my feeds, experimenting of course with prospective search. Apparently Google’s AppEngine now supports a Prospective Search Service. Wyman has glued in some external real-time streaming services as sources, the Prospective Search Service for matching/filtering (which he knows a lot about), and instant messaging through XMPP to deliver matches to clients. The result is FrackIM.
Neat! And the possibility of following Wyman might be enough to get me to actually use Google+.
A lot has changed technically on the Web since PubSub went off the air. Wonder if they were just ahead of their time, which means the core ideas could make a comeback. Then again, there never turned out be much of a business model for these services.