Wisdom Gained!

It was about ten months ago when Trackle was launched and I have learnt a lot since then – from the usage of Trackle by our users, and by broader trends in the consumer websphere.

Let me first talk about Trackle.  I have been very impressed by the pace of user adoption.  Our subscriber community has been doubling every couple of months.  The most popular items being tracked remain crime, shopping deals, people (especially their own names), jobs, travel, stocks, sports and real estate.  An average user tracks about ten items which generate about twenty alerts per day.  Most users seem to be happy with getting these alerts via their daily digest – and many of them look forward to it.  On many occasions, when there were delays in our email server, we have received urgent emails from subscribers inquiring about their digest status – a few even called!  Of course, we would rather have subscribers go to trackle.com more often so that they can discover new tracklets and new features that we add regularly.  The most popular tracklets for SMS alerts are sports scores, breaking news, and select social networking events (eg. Facebook posts).  Now comes the surprising part.  I am amazed at how many professionals are using this service.  Marketing and Sales folks are using it for tracking companies – competitors, prospects and customers.  Recruiters are using it to track people.  I know of even a detective agency using it for tracking a variety of items including classified and media site postings.  The amount of information on the web has become so overwhelming and so multi dimensional (news, blogs, media sites, social networks and more), that it can be incredibly time consuming to stay on top of this varied information – and, that assumes that you have the time to do that in the first place.  Our product team is devising new features to simplify some of these tasks.

In the websphere, the most astonishing trend has been Twitter.  For a company that most of us had not heard about a year ago, it is amazing to see its pervasiveness.  It has become synonymous with real time search – yet another term that was not in the mainstream lexicon a year ago.  Now, everyone is tweeting – from Larry King to Paris Hilton to Kobe Bryant.  And, so many (so called) real time search companies are trying to mine these mounds of data to get to the few hidden gems of information.   Of course, the fundamental flaw is that the gems are far and few between since the bulk of the tweets are mundane and frivolous.  For now, Twitter appears to be the domain of Marketing and PR folks who are running all kinds of experiments to gain experience in extracting value from these billions of tweets. 

The other major trend is the promotion of APIs by social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.  Companies are exploring ways of integrating these services in their own offerings along with extracting value from the immense community generated information that became accessible through these APIs.

I am convinced that there is a tremendous value proposition in mining an aggregation of all this data – whether it comes from tweets, Facebook posts, blogs, news sources, media sites and more.  And, I am sure that some startups somewhere in Silicon Valley are already working on that!

Comments

[Jhangora]

Great service. I hope it remains free!
Just wanted to inform u that email from Trackle is sent to the SPAM folder - both on gmail and yahoo. Maybe they feel threatened by Trackle. Keep up the good work.
Wud gladly make a blog post about ur service. Just gimme a couple of days. Holi round the corner.

[anonymous]

oohhhhh very nice, get a comment you don't like so you remove it. Trying to hide something?

[Shonali5]

Dear Mr Nigam,

I am writing on behalf of Entrepreneur magazine under the Network18 Group. We are a newly-launched monthly business magazine focusing on startups and entrepreneurs. We are in partnership with the US based publication Entrepreneur (www.entrepreneur.com) that has been around for 30 years now and are the Indian avtaar of the same.

Looking to connect with you over e-mail. look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,
Shonali.