Interview: OneRiot Continues Transformation with Real Time Video Search

When browser-based social search engine Me.dium relaunched as OneRiot last year, it seemed like a drastic change for the company. But the intent to focus on social web search remains an integral part of OneRiot, which is launching real time video search results today. Given the focus on both social search and media, OneRiot is looking to real time video search in order to add another useful component for its service. Easily likened to the real time citizen journalism empowerment of microblogging platforms such as Twitter, or useful hubs and memes that keep pulse of the hottest topics right now, OneRiot has a great deal of potential in terms of harnessing the power of social search, and delivering it to users, businesses, brands, and website publishers for several purposes. Adding real time video search is just another step in that direction. Below is an excerpt of an interview with Tobias Peggs, VP and General Manager of OneRiot. Kristen Nicole: Could you give me some background on OneRiot, and about the decision to relaunch Me.dium as OneRiot? Tobias Peggs of OneRiot: The plan with Me.dium was always to create a great social search company. We initially focused on social content discovery - Me.dium allowed you to surf the web with your friends and discover new relevant content together in real-time. In June last year, leveraging the same underlying platform, we launched a more traditional search engine app in prototype, and asked Me.dium users for feedback. Their response was so overwhelmingly positive that we decided to focus primarily on that search engine app - which led to a rebrand and the launch of OneRiot in November 2008. Kristen Nicole: How does OneRiot work? Tobias Peggs: OneRiot is the first index of the real-time web. Our index is fresh and socially relevant, and our search results reflect what real people are buzzing about right now. To create this real time index, OneRiot looks at a range of "social signals" from our 2 million strong community. As they surf the web, they can join a program which helps us build the index, allowing them to share information anonymously with us about what's hot or not. Since November our community has opted in to share over 2 billion pages with us. We also look at other social signals - e.g. the links people are sharing in real time on Twitter - to help complete the picture. Kristen Nicole: In terms of the new video search, how does this layer in to the larger OneRiot service? Tobias Peggs: We launched OneRiot in Alpha last November - and things have gone tremendously well. Users are getting huge value from OneRiot's real-time social search. We focus on delivering "the pulse of the web" - the news, stories and websites that people are buzzing about right now. Video Search is hugely complimentary to that experience. Users who like to get "the pulse of the web" will love the socially-relevant video search results from the real-time web. This all coincides with our service moving from Alpha to Beta, not to mention a refresh of our website's look and feel. Kristen Nicole: What are your ultimate goals in adding real-time video search? Tobias Peggs: The ultimate goal is to deliver more user value. Our users want to be connected to the socially-relevant videos ranked by what people are watching and sharing right now. We're also keen to show off our technology too so video was a natural next step to the evolution of our social search engine. It's the first real-time index of video on the web; an index that changes throughout the day based on what videos are being watched right now. That's pretty cool. Kristen Nicole: Any social media integration for OneRiot? Tobias Peggs: Lots. For example, OneRiot users can socialize around the search results pages - leaving comments which we've enabled via Facebook Connect. Users can search, find great results, comment on it, and share their thoughts with friends. Kristen Nicole: How has your business model had to shift in regards to social media integration, moving from Me.dium to OneRiot? It seems like OneRiot has less social immediacy than Me.dium, lending itself to a more personalized and singular use case. Tobias Peggs: Users search with OneRiot to find the news, videos, and products that people are talking about right now in relation to any topic. With the addition of Facebook Connect, OneRiot users can also share that experience with their Facebook friends, starting conversations on Facebook about the hot gossip, music, fashion, and other stories that they found on OneRiot. Facebook Connect helps OneRiot reveal another social element to "social search". Our community finds information which is relevant to the conversions that they're having today. Now they can easily share that information, and continue the conversation, with all their Facebook friends.

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Interview: OneRiot Continues Transformation with Real Time Video Search

Kristen Nicole

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Kristen Nicole