Michael Garrett (over at Profy) has reviewed CoReap:

CoReap is a great service, in the fact that it adapts to your way of searching and finding resources instead of forcing you to adapt to a new way. When compared with its competition, CoReap is the least intrusive and the easiest to get started with, if you ask me.

Thank you guys for appreciating the essence behind CoReap.

CoReap is also featured on spigit, as one of the selected 25 start-up’s, for their social networking and market simulation platform. Please checkout our profile on spigit and drop a vote/review to support us!

Chao

Relevant and peer-recommended social bookmarks in your favorite web search engine! Need I say more? Give CoReap a drive today!

Pownce (and Twitter) seem like great social mini-blogging tools. If you need a Pownce invite, then drop a message!

After months of hard work (and a lot of fun along the way), we are really excited to officially launch CoReap!

If you bookmark web sites and web pages on a regular basis, or do team research on the web, then CoReap is just the tool for you! CoReap takes a fresh, novel approach to social search and social bookmarking. With CoReap, you can not only manage your bookmarks online, but since CoReap seamlessly integrates with existing web search platforms, bookmarks shared in your social search network are displayed alongside the web search results over a search engine like Google or Yahoo!

So browse over to CoReap.com, and download the CoReap extension for Firefox (version 1.0 RC 1, only 16kb in size, requires Firefox 2.0+, for Windows/Linux/Mac) to start your social search adventure! The extension is currently being served from our domain, but we have also hosted a copy at the Mozilla Addons sandbox until the add-on goes public.

Give CoReap a try today! We are sure you’ll love it! And don’t forget to share your opinions, suggestions or comments with us.

In continuation to Our social search approach – Part II

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

With CoReap, we hope to deliver a useful and fun service to the end-users. If you bookmark web sites and web pages on a regular basis, then CoReap is just the tool for you! CoReap takes a fresh, novel approach to social search and bookmarking. With CoReap, you can not only manage your bookmarks online, but since CoReap seamlessly integrates with existing web search platforms (like Google and Yahoo), bookmarks shared in your social search network are displayed alongside the web search results.

In terms of establishing a robust isolated environment to host the CoReap web application and web service, we had to research & tweak quite a few things. Imagine a tiny plugin (i.e. the CoReap extension) running in your browser, and pinging a web service on a remote server for every Google or Yahoo search you made – to lookup relevant bookmarks across your social search network. That will be resource intensive for the web server alone. Using several preliminary configuration and optimization practices throughout all layers of the application architecture, we had to harden the stability & scalability of the whole system.

To start with, the server hardware and resource allocation were setup. For the CoReap preview release, we’ll have a single-node server to handle the client requests. However, we have positioned it in such a way that branching out to a clustered/distributed model will be rudimentary. Running a Linux-variant, the Apache web server, also had to be optimized. The MySQL database server and search sub-system were also optimized for superior performance in handling all data-centric queries. We have integrated a data caching mechanism on the web server, the database server, and also the application layer (i.e. the browser extension, the broker web service, and the web application). This will give us some additional boost in handling redundant data requests.

For the past two weeks, we have been working exclusively on setting up the hosting environment, and also testing CoReap in staging mode. So far, so good. I’m all the more excited about the shape CoReap has taken since its inception. It’s not flawless yet, but its quite stable for a preview release (a Release Candidate 1 actually). We are looking at the coming weekend for a quite launch to get it all rolling!

The basic idea behind CoReap is that people make decisions based primarily on a few people whom they trust. If the opinions of these trust-worthy people can be collected and shared in a private environment, then this process can be incredibly useful, simple because it is based on trustable human-intelligence. CoReap gains leverage from its concept, which includes the best of social search and social bookmarking ― in one simple application.

Stay tuned for the fully-functional preview release of CoReap, later this week!

In continuation to Our social search approach – Part I

The most damaging phrase in the language is: “It’s always been done that way.”
– Grace Murray Hopper

Starting off from where I left, the basic concept of a “social search-marking” (a loose term for integrated social bookmarking and social search) service came to my mind almost four months ago. This concept was not the next best thing to sliced bread, nor was it rocket science to get started with. However, the benefits of a “social search-marking” service over-shadowed the short-comings which I could foresee. Ofcourse there are a couple of big players in social bookmarking already (specially with Yahoo buying out Del.icio.us), and a number of interesting social search engines cropping up.

So, I embarked on a research spree, mainly investigating on factors such as the feasibility of “social search-marking”, existing market players with atleast 80% similarity to what I had in mind, revenue structure for such a service (profit-making is essential for any venture), and the technology infrastructure needed.

After almost 3-4 weeks of extensive research and analysis, I drew a good picture of what was involved around developing, launching and running a “social search-marking” service. However, not everything aligned with my pre-research plans. I came across a number of bottle-necks which I had to rethink about and modulate accordingly. Two most important findings from my research were:

1. There were no existing web-based services or software tools that combined social bookmarking and social search. Although, its benefits were quite clear to me, atleast from a mental visualization and some less-constructive paper sketches (on coffee-shop paper tissues). Overall, I looked into the offerings and business models of several “social-driven” and “user-generated” services.

2. I also learnt that the technology infrastructure which was needed to build, test and reliably run this service couldn’t be based on an old-school client-server architecture and a sub-standard application hosting environment. So far, I was sure that the application side of it was pretty much a web-based data-driven application, and a small browser extension (to assist in browser-based access to the application, and most importantly search engine integration). The hardware, network backbone and resource management side of it was a different story. Imagine a tiny (and safe) plugin running in your browser, and pinging a web service on a remote server for every Google or Yahoo search you made – to lookup relevant bookmarks across yoru social search network. That would be very resource intensive for the web server alone – hitting it hard on CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and eventually its performance & stability. We had to think in terms of stabilizing all such issues, without escalating the budget.

By the end of March, I concluded from my research that a “social search-marking” service has potential, it will add value to the “online bookmarking and web search” domain, it has prospective users, it can be profitable, and it needs quite a lot of technology infrastructure planning before we can even think of getting it off the ground. By mid April, we were busy! We were in a parallel work mode – doing further research (10% time allocation), initiating the system development (10% time allocation), and planning the core architecture for the service (80% time allocation). We utilized the 80-20 rule throughout the project plan. The majority of our time and efforts went into the most critical aspects of the system. By the time development overtook planning, we stricly followed the guideline to “release early, release often“. That meant, test-driven development, a lot of prototyping, prioritizing the tasks for the first release, and aligning only the required processes to intended objectives. We had to stay focused. Actually, I had planned to launch a blog to jot down the project progress and “lessons learnt” in a continuous fashion. But that didn’t happen until recently. I feel that knowledge management goes a long way.

The entire architecture could be broken into three layers:

1. A data-driven web application – for online bookmarks management and social search networking;

2. A web browser addon – a thin-client to assist in browser-based access to the application, and most importantly search engine integration;

3. A web service – to act as the broker interface between the the browser addon and the remote DAL.

We chose the LAMP stack for all web development, based on the fact that with it there won’t be a learning curve, and it will provide high-end performance along with scalability & flexibility for solution design. Instead of writing the web application from scratch, its “hull” was based on an in-house PHP/MySQL framework that I’ve utilized for several projects. This provided a very flexible time-tested solution to play with. Special consideration was given to the database abstration layer, since this would be a demanding application with very frequent database hits. A caching component and tweaking the database configuration gave us a stable backend. I’m sure we’ll have to work on this further once the application is in production, based on real-world usage analysis. Trust me, no amount of stress testing can compensate for a flood due to the Slashdot effect!

The browser addon was essentially browser-dependent, which meant that we must develop a different addon extension for the Mozilla breed (Firefox/Netscape/Flock), and another one for Internet Explorer. Based on some user preference metrics, we decided to focus on the former (Firefox), and keep the latter (IE) for a future release. The CoReap Firefox extension, which will ideally be a browser-pane frontend to the CoReap web application, mainly assisting in search engine integration (through AJAX), had to be a pure JavaScript and XUL based scripting solution. To improve client-side performance and reduce overheads (server requests), we also made good use of Firefox’ in-built support for SQLite (an embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database). While remotely hosted web applications have a native security model, we made sure that the web browser addon follows the same policy, and maintains high-levels of stability and client-side safety. The Greasemonkey tool came quite handy in rapid prototyping of the basic functionality for the Firefox extension. We knew that once the Firefox extension takes shape, we’ll be able to extend the same feature-set to IE (although building it in .NET).

One of the most interesting features of CoReap, our social search approach, is the fact that it seamlessly integrates with existing search engines. So, you can have access to conventional web search results (as you do now, but something that’s rarely looked at beyond the first few pages), and bookmarks (personally recommended resources) from the social search network that you build around your friends and known experts — all organized on the same search results page! Our search engine integration model was designed to be highly flexible so that the social search results (bookmarks by your and your friends) can be embedded on any web search engine or platform. However, to keep things simple and cater to the largest possible audience, the first release of CoReap will only support Google search (around 43% market share) and Yahoo! search (around 28% market share). While I’m on it, I should mention that CoReap is neither affiliated with, nor endorsed by, Google Inc. or Yahoo! Inc. We do plan to improvise an API for CoReap, so that platform-independent integration is not an issue. I’ll post more about the roadmap and timeline in the coming days.

Not the least, we spent a lot of time (and still are) working out a managed hosting environment for CoReap. A hybrid hosting solution with dedicated resources (i.e. isolated server resources and a strong network backbone) was the only way to go. This will also allow us to scale up, as & when the demand increases. More on this later.

To be continued in part III …

One friday evening, about four months ago, I was discussing about “social networking” with one of my friends over a few drinks in a city pub. We were generally talking about how the whole “social” aspect to “people networking” has blended the six degrees of separation, and how “tag clouds” don’t have a silver lining after all, and how a patent on managing real-life relationships is darn ironical.

My friend (let’s call him Jack), was none the less very optimistic about the job market, and wanted to share a particular project specification with me, on which he wanted a second opinion. He had the link to this online project specification bookmarked in his browser, but didn’t remember it at that time. We wrapped up our conversation on a note that he’ll e-mail me the link to the project document.

Day’s passed by, but I didn’t hear back from him. I guess he forgot about it. I sure did, until, one bright sunday noon, when my aunt (we’ll greet her as aunt Myra) called from the other side of the world to ask me which “wirewall” should she install on her computer. Google search results sort of confused her. You see, my aunt is not one of the most tech-savvy people you’ll meet, so I took the liberty to recommend a “firewall” software I had bookmarked in my web browser. The hangup beep of the phone call, clicked something else in my head. What if, aunt Myra, Jack, and I, people who trust each others opinion, could access each others browser bookmarks in a social search environment, at our ease.

So, if aunt Myra searches for “wirewall” on Google, she instantly gets a “Did you mean: firewall” message to correct her search keyword. Another click and she should be able to view MY bookmarks tagged “firewall” on the same search results page. Now that’s peer-recommended social search! I bookmarked a firewall website, tagged it “firewall …”, and all friends in my social search network are able to search for it – using nothing else but Google web search – from anywhere in the world, at anytime!

This vague thought, also made me ask – why can’t we just use any of those social bookmarking website’s, and stay happy with a lemon soda by the beach! We could use any of those social bookmarking website’s, but will aunt “wirewall” Myra be able to use them too? Relatively, and most importantly, why not have a single usable search platform for both web search (which is by far machine ranked) as well as social bookmark search (which will be trusted human recommended)? Now that was not a million dollar question, but my second thought was could it become a million dollar question? Could the basis of this question be a turned into a usable, and profitable, Internet service?

To be continued in part II …

Howdy! We are proud to announce the launch of the CoReap blog here at WordPress.com (a wonderful blogging service, btw).

On this blog, we’ll be sharing all the news (read “buzz” these days), release updates, features, and our plans, about CoReap. We think you’ll find it useful and fun. Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed. We’ll cover all of the items listed above, plus anything else that can help you to change the way you personally bookmark websites and share them with your friends most conviniently!

We hope you’ll visit often to stay updated on our efforts, and use CoReap (once its released very soon) to ease the hassles with social search and social bookmarking in general.

Andy (CoReap’s Co-Architect, and your blog host), signing off for now.

“Social Search, Made Easy!”