ReadWriteWeb

Real time search was one of last year's most-discussed tech trends and one of the leaders of that conversation was real-time social media search engine Collecta. Collecta worked directly with publishers to build an index of trusted multi-media content that it streamed live on its website and through its Application Programming Interface (API) on other sites. Twitter, WordPress and Flickr were three of its biggest sources.

Today Collecta.com gave up the ghost and is now a parked domain. The company made a strong go of it and but apparently despite having a unique and smart product, talent, money and attention - it just wasn't enough.

A new iPad app launched this month called Planetary. It visualizes your music collection using the solar system as a metaphor and it's visually stunning. It also seems gimmicky, at first glance. The concept is that stars are music artists, planets are albums and moons orbiting a planet are the album tracks. You can browse and listen to your music as if it was a universe. One reviewer of the app on iTunes coolly dismissed Planetary as "visually appealing but useless." With probably unintentional irony, the reviewer gave Planetary just 2 stars.

With all due respect, that critic is missing the point. Behind the design coolness, Planetary shows how data visualizations will become the new interface to your computing experiences. Whether on your mobile phone, tablet device, or walking along an urban street, increasingly you will control how you interact with apps using data visualizations of the kind offered by Planetary.

For the past two years we've been keeping an eye on real-time search engine Collecta, watching as it's inked some big deals, widgetized its real-time feeds and raised some funding. Today, however, it looks like the company has decided to change directions. Collecta announced to developers today that "Collecta is changing over the coming months" and that the API will be unavailable as of February 11.

The home page, once the home of a series of trending topics, now features a real-time feed of images from the likes of Flickr and TwitPic, in an overt hint at the company's likely next move.

Streaming real-time search company Collecta announced today that it has secured additional funding, to the tune of $4.7 million, from Dace Ventures and previous investor, True. Prior investment already totaled $1.85 million.

The company delivers streaming news, via widgets, APIs and its Site Search Platform, to partners. It intends to use the infusion to build out its team and establish more partnerships, according to Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell. Past partnerships have included CNET's coverage of the iPad launch and MySpace's Today on MySpace feature.

Real-time search is very different from regular search. After studying about 1 million queries on real-time search engine Collecta, researchers at Pennsylvania State University came to the conclusion that - relative to regular search - users of real-time search engines tend to search less for adult topics and focus more on technology, entertainment and politics. This, according to the researchers, reflects "both the temporal nature of the queries and, perhaps, an early adopter user base."

We've been keeping an eye on real-time search company Collecta for a while now, and we've been consistently impressed with their product.

The startup has been making headlines throughout 2009 and is wrapping up the year with a bang. This morning, they announced a partnership with MySpace. The resulting utility is part pulse check, part search engine, and all fun. It also serves as an automatically refreshing reminder that this social network is far from dead yet, especially where entertainment properties are concerned.

There were a ton of great products launched in 2009 by big companies and startups alike, but in this post we focus on the best products released by startups.

The easiest way to become a leading product in your industry is to meet a need better than anyone else. The following 10 have proven themselves with great features, substantial marketplace momentum and, most importantly, a game-changing approach to solving a problem.

Most text excerpts that appear on search results pages aren't very useful. Imagine if instead your search engine showed a list of clear sentences summarizing the contents of each link on that search result page. That's what a new service called Factery Labs aims to provide for any service that utilizes the API it's launching today.

You give Factery a list of links and a keyword and it will build an index of all the facts asserted in those links about your topic of interest, delivered in XML or JSON format. The service can run on top of a search engine but could also be used in any number of other ways. I've been feeling unsatisfied with other search engines all day since seeing a Factery demo Monday morning.

Collecta, the real-time search startup we reviewed in May and again in June, is releasing their API today and announcing that the developer of the best application will receive a MacBook Pro.

"The API is really simple to integrate," said Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell in a phone conversation yesterday. "It works very similar to the Twitter search API. We enourage that as a standard and wanted to make sure developers could easily pick it up and use it."

Gerry Campbell was one of the advising investors at Summize, the search engine Twitter acquired and now uses to power search on the site. He's led search at AOL and new tech at Reuters, and now Campbell and a small team of XMPP rock stars are launching an ambitious real-time search engine called Collecta.

Collecta purports to pull in blog posts, comments, Twitter and Identi.ca updates and photos concerning your search query, as fast as technically possible. There are some rough edges for sure at launch, but Collecta has a lot of promise. Pagerank or other systems of authority are in many cases not what you're looking for in search - timeliness is.