Here’s something new being released that I saw ahead of time (thank you, Chris) and was asked to keep quiet about until it launched. Now that Pirillo has posted about it on his blog and so have others, my silence is no longer required.

Chris Pirillo, who refers to himself as “just the proverbial idea guy” explains the genesis of behind gada.be:

It was borne out of several frustrations. If you’ve ever tried to visit a Web site over a mobile device, you know it’s a pain in the knuckle. The domain had to be simple to key-in from anywhere. gada.be is 4232.2233 on most cell phones and/or PSP. Normally, when you want to find something online, you have to choose a Web site (wait for the page to load) enter the query (wait for the second page to load) then see results from that provider. With “gada.be,” you insert the query *AS* the subdomain!

I was frustrated by a similar issue clear back in August 2003 when I whipped up some code to generate random URLs by number of cell phone digits script. My thoughts for this program were creating an easy to type phone number URLs, so one could register an alternate domain name for serving up cell phone content. gada.be is trying to make it easier to skip that need by using keywords to compile information put in RSS feeds.

The big question for gada.be: how current will this information be? And a secondary question of nearly equal importance (if the answer is “cached”): how often will the cache be refreshed?

gada.be was programmed by Shayne Sweeney (is this the guy?) and his friend Adam, according to Pirillo. No links to either of them by Pirillo or others that I’ve seen yet.

My Thoughts
1) I like the concept and applaud Chris and company for trying to do something to deal with the clumsy typing issues on portable devices, as well as more simpler OPML generation from keyword meta sources.
2) I see some potential issues with execution time which hopefully his team will be able to address over time primarily dealing with real time calls to RSS feeds. In some cases these are already over-burdened and can/will provide an unreliable response user experience. Pirillo indicates that they are using APIs but on the gada.be about page none are credited. On that page he spells out the underlying problem:

Remember, we’re pulling in results from all across the Web for you. We’re often restricted by the speed of other servers, not our own. That said, we’re constantly working on ways to render the results faster for you - especially if we have recently cached content for your query.

Even if/with asynchronous JavaScript calls being used to bring in results from these resources, there will be delays because they are dependent on the source data (servers) and what if they are down or not serving to the gada.be service? Scoble already said three vendors won’t play along: PubSub (no surprise there, they march to their own drum), Newsgator and Bloglines. Ouch on the last two which make up well over half the online RSS aggregator market penetration.

3) users will complain about the initial query generation times and there won’t be a whole lot gada.be can do it about unless they go to cached RSS feeds vs. dynamic feeds (calling the feed in real time). In doing this they’d have to do some proactive spidering of common searches to determine what these queries would be before people actually make them so they can return cached pages. This is what some search engines do in their algorithms to precache queries so that users are not running actual real time queries directly against the metal, so to speak.

In fact, gada.be has just been announced and I already saw one new user who commented at TechCrunch already complaining: “Zzzzzz. This thing is maddeningly slow… NEXT!”
4) In reference to #3, Scoble already is apologizing for Chris regarding “servers are getting slammed right now…” gada.be is in great company in this regard because the big guys: Google and Yahoo have both launched services recently that were slammed the first day, so maybe this is a positive sign, not a negative one.
5) the OPML functionality (just add /opml to end of query) will be useful for power users, initially, and more every day users when/if OPML becomes more mainstream.

I wish Pirillo and company the best with gada.be, it’s certainly got the right heart and spirit for as service: to save users time. Must admit that I’m a bit concerned about the commercial aspect hinted at in the future (see gada.be about page) like being able to advertise by keyword. This could lead to some legal snafus with organizations like Playboy who could take huge exception to third parties trying to make money from/off their trademark.

We will have some data to share with gada.be in the future. Thanks again, Chris!

Did this post make you go hmm?

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