Goodbye PubSub
Forbes did a denouement of PubSub, the “prospective” search engine that has come apart at the seams. A public spat over ownership between PubSub founders Bob Wyman and Salim Ismail led to a proposed acquisition by KnowNow falling through. Now, Forbes says PubSub is too broke to even file for bankruptcy.
The PubSub-KnowNow deal was apparently so close to completion a few months ago, they had started telling the press about it. I did a pre-briefing call with the two companies, who at the time insisted it was a “merger.” The idea was that PubSub had the consumer product while KnowNow had enterprise chops. A couple days later, PR asked me to hold the story while “the lawyers figure things out.” What was really happening, it seems, was conflict between PubSub shareholders was killing the deal…and the company too.
Goodbye PubSub!
Update: Just found my notes from that interview. More details on the moot merger after the jump.
- the idea to tie the knot had been circulating for 2 years
- the combined companies were raising a new $7 million Series A, from Kleiner I think
- Salim Ismail’s prior exit from PubSub was purportedly “completely unrelated” to the merger talks
- a telling quote from Bob Wyman: “Our key weakness was we had great technology, but we didn’t have much in the way of management and UI — the face you need to show to the marketplace.”
Shame really..
Two strong and intelligent characters couldn’t make a good idea (and fair technology) work.
I disagree. PubSub was a pretty bad product. It was basically a junk mail machine.
That might be a bit harsh. PubSub was a decent concept in theory, it just didn’t come across in practice. Who really needs IMMEDIATE knowledge about earthquakes (other than people in california)? I think the problems between Salim and Bob were a result of some of the problems that the company was having more than anything else. I think it’s less an issue of “business and friendship” than an issue of a startup that never quite started.
If the money was rolling in, everyone would have been all buddy buddy. But since things weren’t working out tension begin to build quickly. They say money is the root of all evil, but it’s also the solution to 99% of life’s problems (except for finding true love or some such hippy nonsense). I think a lot of the problems that PubSub had wouldn’t have arisen had the business model and implementation been a little more solid.
They are too broke to even file for bankruptcy but their website is still up and running?
Wow..another one off the Web 2.0 chart.
What if I state that I believe Google Alerts is also a junk mail machine? Because I do believe that. I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on PubSub. All of the recent aggregators that I’ve tried suffer from the same problems with volume, relevancy and delivery, at least they do enough for me not to scratch my head over their failures and wonder if some sort of failed working dynamic between the founders was tumultuous enough to kill an otherwise excellent product.
Yawn.
It’s too bad, I worked with them to fix a few issues a while back, liked the service but there were a few gotchas that didn’t seem to ever get fixed. I’m wondering what people think about Blogpulse? Lots of different ways to measure metrics and better eye candy than Technorati, which is a must have but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of raw stats. BP seems to have it’s own share of issues early days for all of these types of companies.
Hi David,
On the corporate side BlogPulse is a bit different from the rest, since it was started at Intelliseek and now is folded into VNU/Nielsen. But you’re right, the BP service is underappreciated.
Corporate famous last words. It wasn’t a technical problem.
I’m a big fan of the publish-subscribe model. I just believe that people don’t have the time to sit and browse along for things to happen. BUT: the main challenge here is NOT scalability of a pubsub server as us techies would like to believe. It is, as others commented, finding the right content to deliver and NOT delivering any other stuff (Precision and Recall, just like in search engines). I’ve come at it from this content point of view and started http://www.alertpedia.com. It’s less of a pub-sub and more of a sub-alert system. But it doesn’t matter to users: they just want to know when that Wii sells on Craigslist or a product is recalled (ok, earthquakes do, because USGS has such a nice RSS feed :) ) Sorry to see you go Pubsub, but you seem to be back, already. good!
vishy http://www.alertpedia.com
[...] intellectual property) of PubSub, the RSS company, that after a promising start flailed and fell out of favor. The deal involves IP, equipment, brands & trademarks but not the company. According to our [...]
[...] (including intellectual property) of RSS company PubSub, which after a promising start flailed and fell out of favor. The deal involves IP, equipment, brands & trademarks, but not the company. According to our [...]
[...] (including intellectual property) of RSS company PubSub, which after a promising start flailed and fell out of favor. The deal involves IP, equipment, brands & trademarks, but not the company. According to our [...]
[...] (including intellectual property) of RSS company PubSub, which after a promising start flailed and fell out of favor. The deal involves IP, equipment, brands & trademarks, but not the company. According to our [...]