We’ve been keeping an eye on real-time search companyCollecta 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.
The new product is based on Collecta’s site search platform and MySpace’s real-time API. For search results on everything from weather to celebrities to trending keywords, it returns a filterable, streaming gallery of a collection of comments, photos, links and videos posted to MySpace by users.
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.
