Tusavvy - from stone soup to social search
Tusavvy is a new social search and bookmarking engine. JaeSung Ro the Korean entrepreneur of ZSOUP told me that his idea was inspired by the Stone Soup story i.e. harnessing the community for building something valuable. He also explained that the TU part of the name comes from the French word you. Tu+savvy = You (are) experienced, knowledgeable and wisdom. Sounds good to me! Social search engines requires four key elements to provide good search results and user experience. The first is a powerful search engine. The second is building large enough community - making it easy to invite new members and adding friends from within. The third is to offer rich content - achieved by making it easy to import bookmarks. And the fourth is content governance - spam removal and preventing people from gaming the system.
Tusavvy is in an early beta phase but I could see that most of these four pillars are addressed. You can search using keywords, tags or combinations of tags. At this point there is no option to invite friends from the outside or to import one’s address book but I assume that this is because it is still in beta. I saw that there is a concept of a buddy so probably there will be an option to make connections with other people in the near future. Content, you can import your local bookmark and Tusavvy also provides a bookmarklet for adding content using the browser - a big time saver. As for content governance, Tusavvy provides the option to create Projects. Project is a group with owner. You can subscribe to groups and add content. I believe that by giving the owner of the group administrative permissions to delete content and retiring project spammers there is a chance for building great and useful content.
Tusavvy’s About page is very intriguing. Here is a blurb about the team.
“Founding members of our team have cumulative 40 years of IT/CE experiences including Accenture, Lucent, Samsung and Silicon Valley upstart”.
I guess that it takes a village to grow a search!
By Keren Dagan
September 26th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
It’s interesting to see all these new search engines popping up and seeing what they come up with to differentiate each other from the rest.
Reading your post, I have to agree that tusavvy looks pretty interesting. If they can keep the early potential of a fully immersive community intact (and keep away the spammers!) they might just be onto something.
Cuil who??