Kozoru searchbot to become multi-protocol, worth trying it
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There are two ways to identify good new services from lame new services: 1) When it launches, its weaknesses must be overcome by its strengths. 2) And when it doesn’t look that good, it must catch on very quickly, before everyone has forgotten it.
And at this game, we have to admit it, Kozoru demonstrates it could do good. Byoms, its search-through-chat bots, went from AOL-specific chat clients to now support all major chat clients, they claim in a press release they sent to us.
For the record, Byoms (Build your own mobile search) allows IM users to search the Web or a particular site without the need to launch a web browser. For instance, if you want to shortcut-seek Wikipedia, you add those bots into your contact list.
- AOL Instant Messenger: byomsWikipedia
- Windows Live Messenger: byomsWikipedia@hotmail.com
- Yahoo! Messenger: byomsWikipedia
- Jabber/XMPP Clients: byomsWikipedia@byoms.com
You then send them a request. And results would appear into your chat window. Byoms should work only on desktop and on Java-enabled cellphones that can run a chat client.
Jul 31, 2006 | By Nuno
4 comments
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I don’t know how many regular users they have, but I almost never hear about the service anymore. It is a shame as they were an interesting team.
While I hope they gain traction and become successful, I see two problems with BYOMS maintenant.
You need to create IM screen names to make your own BYOM. This is really annoying, even with Mailinator. Can’t they work around this somehow? Few are willing to go through this kind of trouble to even try and unproven service like byoms.
I don’t think it’s clear what BYOMs are. Most users would probably think the service ends at the pre-made BYOMs. I don’t have an inside source, but I would guess that most users who signed up added byomsWikiPedia and byomsIMDB to play with for while. Yes, I know there’s lots of text and some videos apparently that explain the process more clearly, but it’s still not obvious within the first few moments of visiting the website. I’ve read them, I’ve even created a byom. The average user will spend five seconds scanning the page looking for buttons to click and then leave when they decide it’s too complicated. It’s true.
Most importantly.. the search results, or answers, are just okay! In fact, it’s unclear what they are. Are we supposed to be receiving answers to questions, or highly relevant search results? As search results, they’re not bad. Hit and miss. I haven’t learned how to “tweak” byoms yet, so maybe that’s the problem (being required to tweak your own byom is another hurdle that 90% of users won’t want to clear, even if they do reach that point, it tests my patience for sure). If one looks at byoms responses as answers to questions.. well, the system doesn’t work that well, in my experience. It’s frequently way off. In most cases it does NOT answer the question. But this is purely anecdotal, I can’t reproduce it on demand. Sometimes it’s kind of an answer, but most of the time it feels like a keyword search on the keywords in my question. Parse out all the question-ness of the question and you get keywords.
I’d like to hear your experience using the system and opinion.
La Baba Ali
I didn’t answer back directly because we transmitted the comment to Byoms’ guys. I thought this way, the answer might be more interesting.
Mais Nuno, quels sont vos avis sur Kozoru ? dans votre expérience..
La Baba Ali
Ali Baba, thanks for the feedback, and thank you Nuno for the forum to address them. Let me take these questions in order and I hope I answer them as thoroughly as you’d like.
1) Even though a lot of bigger IM clients (MSN, AOL, Yahoo) are talking about being open and having interoperability, they still don’t offer a “federated screen names” service (MSN does, but we haven’t been able to make it work yet). This would allow us to offer sign up through the byoms interface instead of sending you to their websites.
We realize this is frustrating, and we’re sorry about that. We certainly tried to get this access before our launch, and we’re continuing to talk to these IM groups to see if it’s still possibly to be get it.
This is one of the reasons we support clients that use the Jabber/XMPP protocol. That way you can create a Jabber screen name all without leaving byoms.com.
2) It may seem like most users would simply take the Consumer (or Subscribers) role, click one of our byoms buttons and add it to their buddy list, we’ve been surprised at the ratio of Consumers to Publishers; the latter being users like yourself who decide to create their own.
Today, it’s pretty close to being a 2:1 ratio between unique Consumers and unique Publishers. However, we’ll see if there’s anyway we can make the difference clearer on the website.
3) Built into every byoms is a technology we call the Natural Language Response algorithm. This means that however you choose to pose your query, be it with keywords or a natural language question, our algorithm extracts the meaning of the query, dives into the source materials and returns the most relevant sentences so you don’t have to spend the time doing it yourself. Sometimes these appear as nice, neat answers, and sometimes the results can be a little mushy.
Any given byoms is only as good as the sources you choose. So there are many times you can make these sources better by choosing a different index (we offer Google, Yahoo, MSN and Gigablast) and adding one or two keywords to include in every search you do. For example, our biz dev guy is a bit of a weather fanatic, so he created a weather byoms from AIM City Weather pages. But he didn’t just stop there. He also included a few keywords that appear before each forecast and he also tweaked the number of sentences returned in the advanced features tab. Now he has a byoms he can simply query with the name of a city and it returns the forecast for the next few days. And that’s just one example. There are many others that have yet to be discovered, and that’s why we’ve given users the tools to customize their own.
I really appreciate the feedback and I want to thank you again for taking the time to express what you think about the system. If you have any other questions, please email support@byoms.com and we should have an answer for you very quickly.