To describe Resultly, a new social startup about to launch its first iteration, would be an exercise in brevity. The best I can muster is, “Social Alerts Engine”, even though that description would be inadequate for the service’s actual promise. Resultly founder, Ilya Beyrak, on the other hand, draws an analogy with Google Alerts and dubs it a real-time social search engine.
So what exactly is Resultly?
In brief, Resultly is a real-time social alerts engine that helps you to create real-time alerts for keyword terms. What makes Resultly different is that you can set up alerts for specific categories and drill-down choices by various parameters to get accurate, real-time updates tailored to fit your requirements.
For example, if I’m looking to buy a used iPhone 4 and my budget is between $50 to $150, I can set up an alert for “iPhone 4” in Resultly’s dashboard under the ‘Product’ category. Resultly will automatically populate my dashboard with real-time updates on any new used-iPhone 4 listing on the market, provided it fits within my budget range.
At launch, Resultly supports 9 categories: Products, News, Finance, Travel, Social, Deals, Jobs, Housing, and Cars. Whenever you select any category for your search term, you are presented with further options – unique to each category – to help you drill-down the search results to your exact requirements. The ‘Cars’ category, for instance, might include options such as price, condition, color, make, etc.
It’s Google Alerts on anabolic steroids: fast, powerful, and extremely useful.
Some example uses: set up an alert for ‘birthday’ under ‘Social’ category to scour your social graph for any upcoming birthdays. Or, set up an alert for “Hono Lulu” in the ‘Travel’ category to get updates on any new deals and discounts. Stretch the service further by setting up alerts for ‘Microsoft’ in ‘News’ to know what’s up in Redmond, in real-time, search for jobs with an alert for ‘PHP Developer’ in San Francisco, or even find new deals in your home city under the ‘Deals’ category.
In addition, Resultly has a social network built-in as well. From the dashboard, you can choose to follow certain searches across Resultly’s social network and interact with other users.
Resultly’s Secret Concoction: Making Sense of Big Data
The Web 2.0 era ushered in by MySpace and its ilk led to an exponential growth in data creation across the internet. By some estimates, over 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook alone every day. Multiply that by the billions of websites across the internet, and you might get a grip on the sheer scale of the amount of data created on a daily basis online.
Resultly represents the beginning of Web 3.0, when the data generated by Web 2.0 is broken down and made sense of. To that effect, Resultly mines data from across the social web – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google+, Tumblr, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. – and filters this largely unintelligible mess of information into more easily consumable data. When you set up an update for ‘baby’ in the Social category, you are essentially commanding Resultly to look through your entire social graph – friends, friends of friends, followers, and fans across multiple social properties – for any posts about a ‘baby’ that relates specifically to you.
This isn’t even akin to finding a needle in a haystack; this is akin to finding a specific needle in a specific haystack spread across a massive field of haystacks.
This rather complex feat of engineering is made possible by Resultly’s truly international team of developers, led by founder Ilya Beyrak (who dubs himself the ‘father of Resultly’).
The company has raised $500,000 in venture funding so far, though I’m not aware of the actual investors. As TNW notes, Resultly is a Microsoft BizSpark startup and most of its underlying technology is built on .Net.
Resultly promises to open its doors to the public very soon with a presence across mobile and the web.
