RawSugar

» see rawsugar.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

RawSugar launched in June 2005 from Palo Alto, into the eighteen months when every startup in California believed tags were going to fix information retrieval. Ofer Ben-Shachar was chief executive and co-founder, with Frank Smadja running engineering. The banner across the top of the site read better navigation for your web.

The mechanism was a bookmarklet, working in Firefox and Internet Explorer and nothing else, which saved any page you were on with a description and your own tags. So far that was del.icio.us. The part that was supposed to be different came after: RawSugar mixed your bookmarks and everyone else's into the same result list as plain web search, then offered to refine what came back by clustering the tags people had attached. You searched once, then narrowed the pile using whatever vocabulary the crowd had already attached to it.

Tagging as a theory of organization did reach Turkey, mostly through del.icio.us links passed around on forums, and I remember the argument more clearly than I remember using any of the tools. Folksonomy was the word people liked. The claim was that a million amateurs labeling things badly would beat one librarian labeling things well.

TechCrunch covered the launch in August 2005 and noticed the problem in the last paragraph. Del.icio.us had just added search of its own. A startup whose entire advantage is a feature the market leader shipped last week has a long hill in front of it, and RawSugar never got up that hill.

~ the dossier ~

~ the tag years ~

What the archived pages preserve is how aggressively social this thing was supposed to be. A result row carried the tags, the person who had saved it, a button to add that item to your own directory, and another to add the saver to your watchlist. The site was carved into channels, and one of the channels was called Web 2.0.

The content is period-perfect in a way that is almost painful. One saved item is a hundred hacks for keeping your web services business at the top of its game. Another is a ten-point primer on bootstrapping. A third is YouTube announcing a New Zealand version of itself. These were the links an entire industry considered worth preserving by hand in 2007.

~ the week it changed clothes ~

There was no farewell post. On 7 February 2008 the crawler recorded the consumer site at around ten kilobytes, tag search and all. Eight days later the same address returned fifteen hundred bytes under the heading Create Discovery Engines with RawSugar, with a subhead about organizing trusted content in an intelligent manner and a contact name for further information.

By the autumn the pivot was complete: private discovery engines for corporate knowledge management, and an interview with the publisher of a selling magazine sitting where the home page used to be. The technology survived under new management and a new audience. The thing people had actually used, the public pile of hand-tagged links, was switched off without anyone being told.

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