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eHub Interviews RawSugar

Thanks to Ofer Ben-Shachar, founder and CEO of RawSugar for this email interview posted December 2, 2005.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

RawSugar: RawSugar is a social search engine powered by member’s knowledge, where search is accelerated by guiding results with member-designated tags. We’re an online community with over 135,000 tagged URLs shared in the two months since opening our public beta. RawSugar enables you to easily:

- Tag any URL for instant retrieval
- Publish your own directory to share with other users
- Search information by users, groups, or topics

Our guiding vision is that adding scalable, explicit human knowledge, using tags, will ultimately revolutionize web search!

eHub: Why did you start this project?

RawSugar: In Spring, 2004, we realized that algorithmic search was bumping up against certain inherent limitations and that adding a human layer is a good way to move past them.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

RawSugar: RawSugar is an angel-funded company with about ten full-time employees. I am the CEO, Frank Smadja is our VP, Engineering, and Guy Tavor is Director of Product Management. We each have previously founded successful, VC-funded companies; I myself co-founded NetDynamics, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems, and Noosh, which is still private but proving out our initial insights on applying the web to large scale print production services.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

RawSugar: The customer is always right and will tell you what choices to make if you listen carefully.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

RawSugar: Our server runs on Java (J2EE) with a little C++ on a PostgresSQL DBMS layer, Lucene, and JSP and JavaScript for the client side.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

RawSugar: We’re adding more social features, such as friends/experts list, popularity and messaging, in the current release cycle. The initial aspects can be seen live on the service.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

RawSugar: We’re seeing a fairly wide geographic variety with users tagging pages (and leaving notes) written in quite a few non-English languages including French, Estonian, Hebrew, Chinese, and Korean.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

RawSugar: RawSugar is fairly new--beta launch was late August--and without any PR or marketing campaign we’re already seeing good repeat traffic based on word of mouth plus mentions in high visibility blogs
(http://blog.rawsugar.com/blog/?p=20) and listings (such as eHub, thanks for the flow). After the next release we expect this to increase significantly.

We plan to extend our service in two main aspects: usability, which can always be improved, to make our unique capabilities even more accessible and the sophistication with which our engine analyzes and presents the material in the system (recommendations and relationships). We tend to follow an agile model of releasing early and often, and always discussing the new and next changes with our users and there’s no reason to think this will change.

Two years is a long time for this industry but broadly we expect our vision of people enhancing search to deliver much more useful results to be proven out and that RawSugar will lead this march.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success? What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

RawSugar: Time and resources because your insights are just a bit further away then your hand can reach.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

RawSugar: Our service will always be free for people to search, tag and publish. We expect to add advertising and similar conventional search revenue streams in the first half of next year.

eHub: If you’re able to disclose this information, how much traffic or usage do you see on an average day?

RawSugar: RawSugar has more than 135,000 tagged URLs with large increases in all aspects of user activity since late august when we launched our beta.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

RawSugar: RawSugar offers members the ability to guide search results by adding structure to the tags in their directories; this is key for publishing directories and publishing search. That is, tags can be organized into true hierarchies for those sets of tags which would benefit from it; this isn’t always or even often necessary because of the intelligence in our software but allows even more human input into search results than only using a flat tag space. A few good, technically-inclined example directories are:

- Guy’s Ajax, http://www.rawsugar.com/collections/guyt/Ajax
- jdrsantos, http://www.rawsugar.com/collections/jdrsantos/
- AboutBlogging, http://www.rawsugar.com/collections/AboutBlogging/

We’re also very glad to see that a large and diverse group of well-respected people quickly grasp and accept our core vision.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

RawSugar: Frankly we think that, while the ideas and technologies underlying what’s commonly referred to as Web 2.0 are useful and improvements over what could be done in 1998-2000, from a 25-50 year perspective they won’t stand out nearly so much. A good analogy is that we’re seeing a shift from, at most, black and white to color TV and not from radio to TV as some people are proclaiming.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

RawSugar: We read a lot and see blogs starting to overtake print media as the best sources of what’s important in our business, something some in the print media also understand as shown by blogs from the Washington Post, CNet, and even research firms like Forrester. TechCrunch is fairly new but covers the space well as does SearchEngineWatch and RedMonk, while people like David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Dave Winer, John Battelle, Richard Macmanus, Barb Dybwad and yourself are important observers.

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

RawSugar: Our minds work best on a normal night’s sleep. Waking hours devoted to RawSugar are much more effective that way.

Thanks to Ofer Ben-Shachar, founder and CEO of RawSugar for this email interview posted December 2, 2005.

Visit RawSugar
Originally added to eHub on Sep 11, 05

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eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

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