PubSub: They’re Baaaaack

PubSub is certainly more well known for its self-induced implosion last year than for the product itself. The company developed what they called a “future search engine” that allowed users to type in keywords and get blog and other RSS-enabled news back as it was published.

It was a good idea, and one emulated by most of the blog search engines over time. But the company’s founders, Bob Wyman and Salim Ismail, never got along and their private disputes eventually turned very public. Ismail left the company after a power struggle, a merger with KnowNow fell apart and the company shut down. Even after that, Wyman kept swiping at Ismail on his blog.

Today, Ismail and Wyman have moved on. Ismail heads up Yahoo Brickhouse, a new semi-autonomous business unit to foster new product development within Yahoo. Wyman works for Google on an internal project known, intriguingly, as PubSub as well.

I thought we’d heard the last of PubSub. But today Ian Bell emailed to say that the company is in the process of relaunching - and sure enough a new home page is up. Bell says that PubSub’s investors, who took over the company after a controversial recapitalization which left some of the minority stockholders steaming, have sold most of the assets to his startup, along with $1 million in fresh capital. He’s now in charge of PubSub.

Bell says they’ll relaunch PubSub in six months or so as a “consumer friendly version of Yahoo Pipes.” Since he won’t say any more right now, we’re left speculating exactly what that will be and how PubSub’s technology fits into it. In the meantime, he says, they’ll be launching a Facebook application in the next month that directly uses PubSub’s matching engine. You tell the application what you like and it will deliver relevant news and information to you on the subject.

Just Don’t Look Under The Carpet

All of the bad blood created with the original PubSub saga hasn’t completely settled yet. The minority shareholders, we hear, are very upset about the way Polygon Capital handled the KnowNow merger discussions and eventual winding down of the company. In the end, Polygon and their associates supposedly owned all of the assets of the company, leaving the founders and minority stockholders with nothing. Polygon never settled the matter with them, and there was little reason to sue given that the company was in limbo. But if the new PubSub is successful there could suddenly be a pot of money to go after, and that could spark new litigation interest from the old shareholders.

Whatever happens, the drama is likely to continue. And all that attention, Bell says, is “great PR” for his new startup.

Update: Bell says below that I misquote him slightly in the last paragraph above, which is highly likely given my poor listening skills. I take misquotes seriously because what really matters (usually) is what someone meant to say, not what they actually said. In this case, it may have been neither. Apologies.

Apple Gets Into Social Music Scene with My iTunes

Apple isn’t just sitting on the sidelines as startups like iLike and MOG and others try to tackle the social music space. Many of these services gather user music preferences via an iTunes plugin. You are then able to tell the world what music you are listening to, get recommendations for new music you might like, etc. People love this stuff, as evidenced by iLike’s ridiculous growth and Last.fm’s $280 million acquisition by CBS.

Apple has launched My ITunes, a set of widgets that may be a first step in taking their fair share of the social music market. Niall Kennedy caught sight of it a couple of days ago.

iTunes is giving you an effortless way to keep your friends up-to-date with your favorite music, TV shows, movies, and more. My iTunes widgets are simple, self-updating add-ons for your web page, social-networking profile, or blog.

Use My iTunes to share your top reviews, favorite artists, and new music, movies, and TV shows from the iTunes Store with anyone who visits your site.

There are currently three embeddable widgets to choose from. One shows recent iTunes purchases. Another shows music you’ve reviewed on iTunes. The last shows a sort of tag cloud of artists you’ve purchased on the iTunes store. The widgets can be customized by size and color.

The first and last widgets only work if you’ve actually bought stuff on iTunes. I’ve bought enough things to create a thinly populated widget below. But what would be far more interesting is a widget that, like iLike, shows your favorite music and plays at least a 30 second snippet of each song.