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.

It quickly became apparent that what the company had to offer wasn't something that enough people wanted to buy. Six months ago Collecta announced it was shutting down its API and moving in a different direction.

It doesn't look like that new direction ever emerged. Two months after that announcement, CEO Campbell left the company to resume his focus on tech investing, according to LinkedIn. And today the site went dark.

It's really a shame. Jared Smith, ReadWriteWeb's main man for all things technical and design, says there's nothing quite like Collecta. "Collecta's emphasis on a search experience that went beyond Twitter into photos and videos made it a great tool to truly watch a story unfold in real time," he told me. "Their embeddable widget, which I used regularly on ReadWriteWeb's event sites, was far more powerful than what Twitter provided and is still unmatched in my mind."

Personally, I suspect that there is too small a market for real time search in the consumer world. Tell a company that you'll search in real time for actionable information about itself, for example, and you could find some interest - but that's a feature not a product and is something that other companies already offer as B2B services. I don't think consumers are interested in real time search, though they are clearly interested in real time messaging and content delivery on sites they already use.

Neither Collecta, nor competitor OneRiot were able to build growing companies around filling this need. The next most likely may be Topsy, which raised another $15m of its now $30m in funding just this Spring. Real-time social stream service Echo appears to be thriving in a related market - that company says it serves up 40,000 real time media items per minute at peak to customers around the web.

Rest in Peace, Collecta and thanks for all the searches.

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.

What's different about Planetary is that it doesn't depend on traditional software controls and design patterns - such as a play button, scrolling down a list of tracks, even flipping through album covers. Instead, the app is controlled by the data visualizations.

In a recent UgoTrade interview, futurist and author Bruce Sterling said of Planetary:

"The thing I consider significant about that remarkable piece of Bloom software is that it uses information visualization as a new breed of control interface. That's not just fancy re-skinning of the same old music-machine pushbuttons. That whole graphic shebang is generated in real-time on the fly. And you can run code with that, play music, do media with it! An advance like that is important."
(emphasis ours)

A Wired review of the app notes that it turns a data set - in this case music - into "tactile and dynamic visual objects."

Imagine those same techniques being used for data from social networking, location, media and real-world objects (the Internet of Things). That's an intriguing development and I'm curious to see what other apps Bloom releases over the course of this year.

When Planetary launched, CNET conducted an interview with Bloom co-founder Ben Cerveny. He firstly explained the origins of the company's name: "we'll make the invisible data visible. We'll make it Bloom."

Cerveny told CNET that Bloom's data visualization apps will become even more powerful once better structured data becomes available:

"...we're also looking to other sources of metadata to augment the somewhat unreliable ID3 tags attached to tracks in iTunes libraries. So many possibilities from more structured data sources could provide countless ways of seeing the constellations of tunes in new ways."

He went on to explain how the tablet has ushered in this new era of the user interface:

"The tablet is a total disruption of how we understand popular computing. The next era of experiences will be driven by visceral gesture-based input, and rich fluid responsiveness in native graphics contexts. I see the potential for Bloom to help define a "killer pattern" for application design."

The big question is whether Bloom can become more than the designer of a slightly gimmicky music app and truly change the way we experience media, social networking and more.

The 2-star reviewer may have been harsh, but they were correct to say that Planetary isn't actually that useful. It is however a clear indicator of the future of user interfaces - and Bloom is well positioned to be a star.

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.

At the time of that article's writing, we also noted that 60% of Collecta's queries came in via its partner API - the one it's now shutting down. So where is Collecta headed next?

We spoke with one Collecta employee recently and they told us that the next move was to focus on specific feeds that the company could monetize on. By the looks of today's redesigned homepage, we're figuring that one of those feeds is real-time images.

"Collecta is changing," the company announced on Facebook today. "While we work on what's next, take a minute and enjoy a view of what's happening right now." (emphasis added)

They also told us that the company would be focusing on mobile apps in this effort, but wouldn't offer details beyond that. 

Campbell's conversation today with Mashable's Jolie O'Dell confirms this direction, as Campbell noted that "a destination site is not the correct vehicle for reaching people" and that "new behaviors, specifically with Facebook and mobile, are growing."

What the final product will look like, we're still unsure of, but after a couple years of being in the real-time space, we're hoping Collecta has figured out what works and comes out with something to knock our socks off.

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.

"We've got a solid team and have spent time building a scalable infrastructure," Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell told us in a phone conversation. "Now, Collecta is more than a great idea. We understand the business behavior of our users and we'll be building out a full-fledged business."

Campbell anticipates adding personnel in business development, program management and ad sales - the latter because one of the major initiatives on deck is the creation of a full-fledged advertising system.

We've mentioned in previous coverage that when we tested Collecta, the news it streamed from 15 million content sources was in fact less than a minute old, and that its widget is freely available for anyone to use in their website.

Collecta says that 60% of queries it sees come in via its partner API. OneRiot, its main competitor, says it sees 97% of its queries that way.

Collecta is notable because it forms explicit partnerships with publishers, such as WordPress, and stream their content into the index in real time.

OneRiot focuses more on P2P indexing with the use of their installed toolbar and indexing Twitter & Digg. They also recently launched an ad network.

Real-time searches also tend to shy away from many normal search parameters: big on entertainment and very low on porn.

Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of Collecta. ReadWriteWeb's real-time web coverage is here.

Disclosure: In addition to announcing a new round of funding, Collecta is also an event sponsor of this week's Real-Time Web Summit.

According to the data the research team collected, most real-time queries come from third-party applications and don't happen on the search engine's own page. On Collecta, API queries account for about 60% of all queries and we've heard similar - and often even higher - numbers from other real-time search engines. As these API-based queries are often repeated multiple times throughout the day, real-time search engines also tend to see fewer unique queries than regular search engines.

Top Queries

The researchers also collected a list of the most popular queries on Collecta during a 190-day period at the end of last year. This data shows that the typical queries on real-time search engines are quite different from what we would expect to see on a regular search engine. Even the most popular search term ("naomi watts"), only accounted for 0.003% of all queries. According to Hitwise, "facebook" is currently the most popular search term on all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) and accounts for between 1.17% of all queries on Google to 2.6% of all queries on Bing.

Where's the Porn?

As the researchers note, Collecta registered almost no searches that were pornographic in nature. "Sex" was the ninth most popular search term and only accounted for 0.002% of all queries.

Early Adopters

As the researchers rightly note, the list of most popular search queries on Collecta reflects the early-adopter nature of the service. The fact that the second-most popular query was "jQuery CSS" is a good example for the nature of real-time searches. To some degree, of course, these numbers are also biased towards Collecta's users and the kind of applications that have been developed on top of Collecta's API.

It will be interesting to see what these numbers look like by the end of this year. If "jQuery CSS" is still in the top 10 of most often used queries, we can safely assume that Collecta - and maybe real-time search as a whole - hasn't reached a mainstream audience yet.

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.

Based on IM protocols, Collecta's search platform pushes out content in real time as it's published. Each result also includes the poster's "mood," which also serves as a built-in mechanism for sentiment analysis.

"Collecta brings the size and richness of the MySpace community to light," said MySpace COO Mike Jones.

"Its instantaneous results provide insight into our users' moods and activities. It's great to see how quickly Collecta has used the MySpace Real-Time Stream API to deliver new value to people on the web."

Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell also called MySpace one of the most vibrant web properties, saying, "MySpace users are actively sharing an amazing volume of pictures and media, as well as expressing their thoughts on a very emotional and raw level. Our search platform cuts right into the center of all this activity. It reveals a slice of humanity that you couldn't see otherwise. Even a search for a basic term like 'happy' is incredibly fascinating."

In addition to showing results for search terms, the new product also shows a brief overview of three top trends currently on MySpace.

Collecta's general search function currently aggregates data from a slew of news and social sites and will soon incorporate publicly available data from MySpace, as well.

MySpace's partnership shows an interesting use of Collecta's site search, but it's far from the only application. The platform can be used to show activity, trends and perspectives on just about any website.

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.

Location-based Apps - Foursquare: Launched at SXSW, Foursquare is a location-based social application where users check in on their iPhone at various businesses and compete against their friend network for points. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's launch in March. Since then it has partnered with Bay Area Rapid Transit and a number of businesses to offer location-based deals to users.

iPhone App Recommendation - Appsfire: In a world where iPhones seemed to saturate the earth, Appsfire offers a great way for users to share their favorites. Launched in August, ReadWriteWeb praised the convenience of the iPhone app. Four months after downloading it, many of our RWW teammates are still sharing their apps via the embeddable Appsfire widget and the iPhone application.

Real-Time Search - Collecta: If you're interested in finding out the latest info on a particular product, Collecta offers real-time search with a variety of results including blog posts, photos and Twitter and Identi.ca posts. ReadWriteWeb covered the company's release, which launched in June. In September the company released its API to developers.

Twitter App Discovery - OneForty: Dubbed the "unofficial Twitter app store," OneForty is a marketplace where Twitter developers add their applications for discovery. End-users can add their reviews and recommendation to be featured on the service's front page. Launched in September, Oneforty breaks down the applications into easy-to-understand categories and features the most popular apps and recently uploaded apps on the homepage.

Next Page: Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 6-10

All-You-Can-Eat Music - MOG All Access: Although MOG has been around as a blogging network for a few years, earlier this month the company launched its much-anticipated $5-per-month streaming music service. The product's unique features include a discovery bar slider where users can play streaming radio and tweak the flow of recommendations to their liking. Coupled with an iPhone app that is promised to encompass offline caching, MOG All Access is a great service rivaled only by close competitor Spotify.

Web TV - Clicker: Launched in mid November, Clicker is considered the TV Guide for Internet television. The company indexes 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows and features a DVR-like playlist (including Netflix Instant Streaming and Amazon VOD) and integration with Facebook connect. Clicker also has a Boxee app that pulls in metadata for shows, channels and actors.

Semantic Search - Evri: Evri is a semantic search engine with a matching algorithm that creates connections between people, products and concepts. Launched in mid-June, ReadWriteWeb first reported the product's ability to distinguish between subjects, verbs and objects to make connections.

Conversation Aggregation - JS-Kit's Echo: While JS-Kit has been around for three years, the company' latest product Echo is a better iteration of blog comments. ReadWriteWeb first wrote about the product launch in July. The service allows users to embed a simple line of javascript in their blogs in order to gather a real-time stream of Diggs, Tweets, comments and reactions.

Augmented Reality - Layar: ReadWriteWeb readers first got a glimpse of Layar in June. Created by SPRXmobile, the service places images and data on the mobile browser for a new form of location-based augmented reality discovery. In July, SPRX released the company's first developer keys for the API and by August it had celebrated an Android release with an iPhone app to follow. The company currently has a gallery with several cool 3rd-party applications.

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.

Compare that with the Factery results page - I don't even need to click through if I don't want to, I feel like I got a great overview of the story just from my search page. Perhaps that's a problem - for a publishing industry that already says it's scared of search engines - but as a reader it sure isn't my problem, it's great. Why would I want Google News to tell me where I can go to find information if someone else will just give me the information?

The company's test demo searches Twitter and Yahoo Boss - neither search is as exciting as I'd hoped 100% of the time, but it's often remarkably good. Factery is also testing an interesting integration with Silverlight stream reader Sobees, in which linked pages from Twitter or Facebook are annotated with automatically extracted highlights via Factery.

I expect a whole lot of companies are going to at least try this API out and I'm excited to see the results.

How This is Unlike Other Real-Time Search Services

Factery is talking a lot about its ability to analyze links shared over Twitter, but that's probably just because Twitter is easy for people to understand. The fact is, the service can perform on-demand analysis of text behind any set of links. That's what differentiates it from other real-time search engines like OneRiot, which also analyzes the text of pages linked to on networks like Twitter and offers an API to display real-time search results on other sites. Competitor Collecta analyzes Twitter streams in real time and offers an XMPP API to push new search results live to any page.

Factery is a different kind of animal, though. It's more like a smart search inside any other search. It doesn't even have to be search, though. The company talks a lot about how they make mobile reading more efficient by pulling the salient information up to the surface of a page, instead of requiring mobile readers to load multiple pages.

I thought of five or six different ways I'd like to use it just while talking to the company on the phone. (I'm not going to share those here, either. I think some could offer an important competitive advantage.)

I'd Love to See This Work Everywhere

Yesterday I was testing a new Android app from the Sunlight Foundation that lets you track members of congress. One tab in the app is a search for your congressperson in the news. Unfortunately, the page excerpts give no indication why the politician you searched for appeared in that news story - just that their name did, somewhere. That search is powered by a Yahoo API, probably BOSS, but it's not any fun to use at all. How unsatisfying, I thought, when I could have a list of key facts concerning my search query in the list of links that the search brought back. But that was yesterday, and Factery is just launching today.

The possibilities are truly endless. That's probably why Ron Conway, one of the leading investors in the real-time economy, joined others in investing in the company. With $1.2 million in the bank, Factery is a modest developer play with a whole lot of potential.

Give Factery's API a try and let us know what you think. It's free to use; the company says it may start inserting "sponsored facts" (isn't that an interesting phrase) into results later but things like business model and to a lesser degree de-duplication are still works in progress. I sure do love this idea.

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.

Three of us at ReadWriteWeb tested Collecta this morning and only one of us got a consistent flow of new results coming in. It was slow and choppy for two of us, on three different internet connections. The ability to filter out certain kinds of results, to run multiple persistent queries at once and to preview items before clicking off site to read them were all great features.

Twitter search results, unfortunately, link out to a user's front profile page, not the particular Tweet that is shown on the results page. We imagine that's a small oversight that will be fixed promptly.

Blog posts are limited to WordPress.com blogs at launch, as the companies have common investors and an agreement. Sometimes filtering for comments on blogs brings up results when filtering for blog posts does not.

Despite warts and bumps, there's really nothing else quite like Collecta available on the market right now. It's a good way to get a handle on the real-time flow of information about a topic and it has an incredibly strong team.

We expect real time search to be an important part of the search world as Twitter search has already changed the way we research things online dramatically. Expanding that out into more media types is something that just has to happen.

We'll be keeping a close eye on Collecta as it expands and improves.

On the sample pages, the engine collects tweets, Flickr photos, blog posts, and comments containing the given term and updates the page with text, images, and links in real time. The site is slated to go live and announce an API this month.

We tweeted the term "swine flu" and counted the seconds - all 19 of them - for this to appear:

Currently, the results we can see are simply any and all content containing the search term. There isn't a link-indexing system in place or any PageRank-like concept, just a steady stream of data that may be in some way related to the search term. Whether or not Collecta really is, as the website states, "the web's most powerful real time search engine" remains to be seen. We'll be staying tuned for the full launch later this month.

Collecta's team includes CEO Gerry Campbell, formerly president of search and content technologies for Reuters, SVP of search for AOL, and AltaVista strategist. Their creative director has held similar positions at Blogger and Technorati, and the CTO is Open Source geek Jack Moffitt.