I love the net. It’s full of information and it’s accessible. It’s even more powerful when the information is accessible electronically, through a simple mechanism.
Take Wikipedia as an example. Before Jimmy Wales began Wikipedia, the web was full of information. There were search engines that made all that information accessible and it was good enough as the search engines (especially Google and Yahoo) did dig pretty deep and indexed all that information for the general public. However, Wikipedia took it to a whole different level by two ways:
- Harnessing the power of millions of contributors, Wikipedia essentially cleaned up, re-arranged and re-presented all that information into a nice set of wiki pages. These pages were kept up to date via peer review.
- They made all that information downloadable, which is just fantastic, as now we have the potential to build on all that information that has been cleaned and re-arranged.
And along comes Hubdub. I first read about them a couple of months ago and just skimmed through it. I remember thinking “it’s just another web application, with some social networking information and a big poll database”. I was dead wrong! It’s not just another social network web application. Right now, I look at it as being the “opinions market”.
Somehow through my blog feeds, I stumbled upon a blog entry by a category editor at Hubdub who has been with them for over a year. She does mention the reasons that made her stay for a year, and that’s when I thought – “maybe I should take a second look”.
If you have a look at Hubdub, it is full of polls, and visitors can bet on a poll going one way or another. To me, it felt a lot like the beginning of the internet – where there was information everywhere but it was segregated. For example, there’s a lot of news information coming out from Google News, BBC, Reuters and all. Then you have Hubdub that captures the market opinion on these events. On top of that you have social news sites that vote on articles based on these events and rate comments. Tie all of these together, clean it, re-arrange it and you’ll end up with a pretty decently news aggregator that might be able to predict the future outcome of events. This idea is far from mature, and there are already some stumbling blocks. for e.g. (not a complete, exhaustive list) :
- Visitors to these sites might only reflect a small percentage of the general population and will be skewed
- Groupthink
- Skewed ratings and poll results
All of this can be solved, but before this idea can move into a concept, Hubdub needs to provide an API. It needs to be able to make all that information sitting on their database accessible. They don’t have to provide it for free as well (I will be happy to pay for it).
Why an API ? Well, crawling and scraping websites is a pain. If Hubdub change their layout, most of the time, the scraping rules fail and you’ll end up with the results from your “prediction engine” all wrong. So, they need an API. They need to provide a nice, neat way of accessing all that information on their polls. Without the API, all that potential will be lost. Just like what Wikipedia did for general knowledge via their database download, Hubdub have the potential of doing the same thing for opinions and polls. We as entrepreneurs/developers/ideas-people will be able to stand on the shoulders of giants and build amazing things by leveraging on the work that Hubdub have done in gathering a community around polls.
If they play their cards right – increase number of visitors (compete.com puts them around 60k users) and provide a decent API – I can see them flourishing. I do have a few ideas on small niches where the information they provide might be useful when aggregated along with other information sources.
They do mention on their FAQs that there is an API coming up and I can’t wait. Hubdub – bring the API on!
Tags: Information, Internet, News
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Hey Roopinder, part of the original idea was for the prediction markets in Hubdub to drive news aggregation and it’s potentially something we’ll return to. Right now we’re focused on making participation in the site as exciting as possible. As far as the API is concerned, it’s something I’ve been working on and hope to release before too long.
Hey Tom! I’m going to keep a close eye on Hubdub. You are right – user participation is extremely important and is the fundamental building blocks on Hubdub
I’m going to keep a close eye on it, and eager for the API!