10 Questions with Otis Gospodnetić on Simpy.com
Well I can’t believe that it is Wednesday for one and 10 am as well. So today I have an interview with Otis Gospodnetić the founder of Simpy and that is are subject. I hope this interview provides all of you with information that is as useful as I found it. So let get this show rolling as usual.
How long has Simpy been around?
The Simpy idea is an old one. The timeline is roughly as follows:
I started thinking about it and tinkering with it in 2002.
After going through lists of neutral, easy to remember, and possibly interesting names and available domains, I decided to go with Simpy.
The simpy.com domain was registered in June 2002. In the beginning, I worked on Simpy slowly and part-time. Finally, I released the first version of Simpy to public in May 2004. Since then I’ve tried to make a new release every month or two. Here’s the full history of Simpy releases.
Why was Simpy Started?
It sounds like a cliche, but I started Simpy out of a personal need. I’ve always been interested in information gathering, analysis, extraction, and retrieval. I (and everyone else with a web browser) had this nice collection of bookmarks inside the browser, but no ability to find anything in that potentially rich collection of information. You may know that you once bookmarked a site about insert your topic here, but you couldn’t really find it in the haystack of folders and subfolders. There was no bookmark search inside the browser. There was no full-text search that everyone was already used to from daily Web search engine usage. There was no way to check which of the bookmarks have gone bad (404) or have changed their locations on the Web. When you found a web site at work that you wanted to bookmark in your browser at home, you had to resort to methods such as emailing yourself the URL. And then came the problem of filing. Which category, which folder or subfolder does each bookmark go into? What happens when you want to file a bookmark in more than one folder? And what happens when you want to find this bookmark later? You have to remember exactly which place in your folder hierarchy you saved the link. Impossible! Slow! Tedious! Welcome tags!
Where do you see Simpy in 5 years?
While I think I solved all of the problems that I initially saw with bookmarking, new problems and new ways of doing old things always come up. People who use services like Simpy quickly adopt the basic functionality, establish their usage patterns, learn that more can be done and had, and then they demand new features. I add the new features, and the whole cycle repeats indefinitely. When it comes to features and functionality, where Simpy goes in 2006 and beyond will largely be dictated by the community of Simpy users. Simpy is lucky to have a great group of loyal, smart, and advanced users who help push Simpy forward by suggesting new ways of improving it.
To communicate with the users, Simpy has 2 mailing lists: simpy-user, for regular Simpy users, and simpy-dev, for those who want to build tools around and on top of Simpy. In addition, there is the blog that accompanies the service .
Personally, I hope that Simpy remains a fun and exciting project for me, and as long as that is the case, I will continue running it, evolving it, and creating small revolutions here and there.
What do you think Simpy is doing better than other services of its kind and why?
As I already mentioned, I’m in love with information. This love is one of the reasons why I’m involved with Lucene, a very popular and high-quality open-source search engine library developed under the Apache Software Foundation brand, which led to Lucene in Action that I co-authored with Erik Hatcher. Naturally, I put a lot of value in search, and thus Simpy has always had the best search functionality compared to other similar services.
To make the long search story short(er), with Simpy you can enter all kinds of queries that let you really zoom in on the information you are after. Topics and Topic Filters are extremely powerful ways of watching others’ bookmarks, and discover new sites with minimal effort. All you need to do is find authorities on topics that interest you, subscribe to those people, and watch over their shoulders. Unlike other services’ single “Inbox” feature, with Simpy you can have any number of Topics and any number of Topic Filters. Topic Filters are simply saved searches with a scope of a Topic, which means you can use the same expressive power that you get with the regular search. The Notes feature is also very handy, as it lets you select a piece of text on any Web page, save it and tag it for later retrieval. Not many other bookmarking services have this features, if any. There are other features that put Simpy ahead of others, and some of them are mentioned in “Why Simpy over del.icio.us” blog entry. The entry is from August 2005, and since then Simpy has advanced through several releases.
My favorite new feature is the Group functionality, which, I think, makes Simpy truly social and different from other “social” bookmarking sites. One of my pet peeves is the common misconception that a service is “social” simply because its users have no choice but to make all their information (bookmarks in this case) public. I think”social” is the wrong adjective to use here. The analogy I often make in my head is this: Humans are social creatures. We have a circle of friends and acquaintances. We share some things with that group (or groups) of people. We chat with them more often than with strangers. We do not chat with just anyone and everyone on the street. Thus, I like to distinguish between making the information public and sharing information with a group of selected people. It is the sharing with a selected group that makes a service “social”. This is why Simpy has the Group functionality. I’m intrigued by human social behavior and much of what I do with Simpy are emulations of real life.
Where do you think Simpy needs work and why?
There are ways to make Simpy even more social and suitable for information discovery, and I plan on improving that facet of Simpy. Also, I’m not an UI expert, and while many people like Simpy’s UI, I have been told that it is too busy, so I hope to find a way to make it cleaner in the coming months. I will also be bringing forth some buried and therefore underutilized features, such as Topics, Topic Filters, and Notes. It was quite interesting to watch people leave del.icio.us to join Simpy when Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us. A few days after the initial wave of newcomers, I saw an emerging pattern in the type of feedback I was getting. A lot of ex-del.icio.us users were requesting the same 2-3 features that they were used to. Clearly, these features will be included in the upcoming release.
What have some of the mistakes been that Simpy has made and why do you think they are mistakes?
I’d like to think that I haven’t made a lot of mistakes with Simpy. However, I wish that I had had the ability to devote more time to Simpy during the initial phase in order to make it public sooner. On the other hand, during the same time, I was very involved with Lucene. Had I not been as involved with Lucene, I probably would not have had the opportunity to co-author Lucene in Action, which was a great experience that paid off in many direct and indirect ways, personally and professionally.
Why should people use Simpy over other services?
Simpy’s strength lies in its rich set of features, many of which other services do not have, such as powerful search functionality that includes full-text search, Groups, Notes, Topics, Topic Filters, etc.
Simpy is completely open, in the sense that that it provides an API that lets users and developers take their data out of Simpy, manipulate it, integrate it with other applications and services, remix it, back it up, etc. From day one, I provided the export feature, as I did not want Simpy to be one of those unfriendly services that keep users locked in. I want people to use Simpy by choice, because they find it useful, and not because they have no way to leave without losing all of their data and hard work. The door is wide open.
In addition, the smart users that I already mentioned make the social aspect of Simpy even more enticing and beneficial for everyone in the Simpy community.
Where do you see web based bookmarking in 5 years?
Five years is a long time in Internet terms. Currently, only a small fraction of regular Web users is aware of the Web-based bookmarking options, not to mention services with abilities beyond the core bookmarking functionality that’s been around since the Mosaic times. Until this fraction increases and moms and dads around the planet start bookmarking and tagging pages with the same ease they use email today, I would still consider Web-based bookmarking in its infancy.
As I said earlier, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the social aspect of bookmarking. I think people will increasingly find that they can benefit by sharing selected pieces of information with one another, the same way they share data in various file sharing networks (legally, of course). Similarly, I think people will realize that social bookmarking and similar services make for a great”micro-market”. I see a lot of exciting and innovative things that could happen within this “micro-market” ecosystem, for example, with individuals benefiting from sharing their content and expertise. I would like Simpy to be part of that evolution.
What hurdles do you and web bookmarking in general have to overcome?
The bookmarking services are still used mostly by more advanced users. While people and companies running bookmarking services can help speed up the adoption process by making things simpler, I believe that the process can be sped up by only so much. The rest will come naturally, as the space and its users mature and evolve. Just like everything else in life. As for me, I need a clone.
What else would you like to let people know about Simpy that I may not have asked?
I think we covered most of Simpy one way or the other, but it may help to summarize a few things:
Simpy offers a demo account (demo/demo), so people can try it out before signing up. When they sign up, they can sync their bookmarks from del.icio.us or upload their bookmarks (pretty much all browsers are supported). Bookmarks and tags are imported in real time and become full-text searchable shortly thereafter (think My Very Own Mini Google). Simpy has a unique set of tag management features that, I believe, cover all aspects of tag manipulation.
I think that a few other special features are worth emphasizing:
* Simpy integrates nicely with web browsers through a plugin or a bookmarklet.
* The REST API allows for integration of Simpy data with other applications and services.
* In addition to Web pages, users can save, tag, and search any linkable type of data (an image, an audio or video file, any type of document be it PDF, Word, or plain text, etc.).
* Through the Notes feature, users can save, tag, and search any piece of text of any length from any source (Web page, Word document, email…)
* Users have a choice of making their bookmarks public, private, or share them with one or more Groups. Groups is a great feature that allows users to collaborate with colleagues, friends, or family.
* The Topics feature, on the other hand, lets users lurk and watch other people’s public links.
* Complementing the Topics feature, Topic Filters let users weed out uninteresting links and focus on links that truly interest them.
While I’m the lonesome warrior behind Simpy, and I only get to work on it during my free time, I have derived great pleasure from building it, watching it grow, and working with a great group of users. Their enthusiasm and insights have provided tremendous support. I hope that together we can push Simpy to where no tag has gone before. 