Mechanical Zoo Social Search (Beta)

[engine]

News of Mechanical Zoo came to my attention via Cnet and it looks an interesting concept.

Nathan Stoll, former product lead of Google News, has been quietly working on a new social search service he started with the help of two other Google refugees, CNET News.com has learned. The site, called Mechanical Zoo, is poised to launch in beta next month.

The San Francisco company, which is about 9 months old, has an impressive team of tech veterans. It was co-founded by Stoll; Max Ventilla, a former business development manager at Google; and Damon Horowitz, a longtime computer scientist and former lead engineer of Perspecta, a search software company that sold to Excite@Home in the dot-com heyday. Fritz Schneider, who was an application-security engineer at Google for about five years, heading up the Google Firefox team, is also a part of the 12-person staff.

Mechanical Zoo Social Search (Beta) [news.com]

[themechanicalzoo.com...]

[SEOPTI]

I'm sure the term ZOO should be reserved for animals and for protection of animals but not for technical nonsense.

[Hester]

Might fit well with the animal theme on the web - Firefox and Safari come to mind.

[IanKelley]

From the zoo site:

We move quickly, attempt to fail fast (if at all), and move forward with what we learned from our experience. Our approach...
is data driven
is experimental
is user-focused
is leveraged
utilizes rapid iterations

Data driven... That's unlike the rest of the internet how?

I was just thinking the other day how nice it was that no one used the word leveraged (in relationship to business) with a straight face anymore. Silly me.

Sorry couldn't resist.

[LifeinAsia]

I was just thinking the other day how nice it was that no one used the word leveraged (in relationship to business) with a straight face anymore.

It's the new paradigm for thinking outside the box. ;)