User:Roger Elie/Theroom35

Theroom35 Project

Type of site	search engine
Available in	English
Founded	May 2008
Created by	Julien Cohen-Solal and Adrien Gotti
URL	www.theroom35.com
Commercial	No
Registration	Required
Launched	December 12, 2009 (public)
Current status	Open to public

New article name is Theroom35

Theroom35 describes itself as a collaborative search engine powered by word-of-mouth, which means that users feed it with their own results.
Theroom35 Social Search Project aims at bringing a complement to traditional major search engines that reference the Web. It offers a space (called “the Room”) for users to share what they found good or bad with people they know. This is what the tagline “Like it, Spread it. Search it, Find it.” on the homepage suggests.

Users can publish any information to save them online and to make them searchable by their network. Consequently, they can also search for results that come from their connections.
Theroom35 was founded in November 2008 by Julien Cohen-Solal and Adrien Gotti.
After several private versions, a public version was released on line on December 12, 2009. Theroom35 is not run by an incorporated organization.

History

Theroom35 Project

Theroom35 has been a side project for a while. It was initially led by Julien Cohen-Solal and Adrien Gotti, two roommates who shared the B35 dorm room on HEC’s campus. They have thought, designed and built the service as they were completing their studies at HEC School of Management, Assas Law School, and Telecom Paris.
During their penultimate year on the campus, the pair realized the benefit of word-of-mouth as an information source. Like all their classmates, they were looking for foreign internships,second-hand TVs, friendly bars, fresh sounds, effective places for dates...They shared all of these with friends that used to drop by their room.
That is what inspired B35’s roommates to work on a small website where classmates could spread and search results that are traditionally shared (and often distorted) by word-of-mouth. They were aware that this way of finding information was naturally used by everybody. Therefore, they decided to develop their search engine on a larger scale.

Theroom35's Gestation

Convinced that they needed to know their product from core, Julien managed to persuade Adrien that they had to code it themselves. Plus, they have not thought the service as a business. It was then out of question and out of budget to outsource the development. Above all, despite their lack of prerequisite skills, they both felt that the technical side was part of the adventure.

That was not an easy job. Adrien was exaggeratedly reputed as “unable to send a text from his Nokia 3310”, but it was true that he knew nothing about computer sciences. His first email address was given by the school (by age 20).

Julien had already developed a simple website dedicated to referencing local businesses and services around the campus and in his neighborhood. During this first experience, he got a deep taste for web development. By teaching Adrien the basics of Internet protocols, web programming and hosting, Julien managed to transmit his joy of coding to his newbie partner.

Advised by a friend, the pair took two intensive weeks to learn Ruby on Rails from scratch, through O’Reilly "La Pratique de Ruby on Rails" by Eric Sarrion. After spending 2008 summer working on the source code, which turned the team in passionate geeks, they were finally able to deploy their search engine on the Amazon Cloud. On November 8, 2008 an alpha version was opened to a first group of close friends.

Theroom35 team took into account the feedbacks from those very first users to release a campus version on January 28th, 2009. The quiet good reception of the service (almost a third of the students registered during the two days following the launch) led to a major slowing down of the website. Nevertheless, many students sent their suggestions and advice to the founders, who decided to take a break to think about a more comprehensive version of the service. The public version was released on December 12, 2009.

Service

Uses

Theroom35 does not claim to provide the same kind of information as general web crawling search engines. It only focuses on social search.
On Theroom35, users can both publish and search results.

• Publish results: save & spread

Users can post any information that they might share by word-of-mouth, bookmarking online any things they have liked (or disliked).
Thus, they build a personal online database of information they can access anywhere any time. Above all, they make their results searchable by the people they are connected to.
Moreover, users can forward any result they found through the Room, spreading the word to their own connections.

• Search

By typing a request in the search bar, the users find a list of ranked results that come from their connections.

Functioning

• Login
  

To use the service, users have to “enter the Room”, which amounts to register.
Due to algorithm he same search by two different users raises two different lists of results, depending on their respective connections.

• Construction and nature of the network
  

To reach information other than posted by themselves, users must build a network by plugging in people or hubs (hubs are groups or communities created by users).
No connection with people can be effective without the request being accepted.This policy results in the construction of a symmetric network: when two nodes are connected, they can both receive and send information to each other.

• Spread
  

If not tuned otherwise, each result is spread to all the connections of the user, as well as to people connected to them.
The choice of the founders to implement that kind of diffusion relies on the old idea that the friends of my friends are my friends. This mechanism improves the word-of-mouth process.

• Results
  

A result is composed of a title and a category, as well as optional details like web link, description, pictures, location...

• Ranking
  

When browsing through the search bar, tags or labels, results are ranked from more to less shared.
When browsing through a people or a hub page, results are ranked from more to less recent by default.

Values and positioning

As the comic created by Julien to reveal the project explains, Theroom35’s core concept draws inspiration from three major kinds of online information sources: classical search engines (like Google), micro-blogging services (like Twitter) and social networking websites (like Facebook).

In this comic, Julien uses a chemical equation as a metaphor to describes the composition of the service: 3Tw + 2Go + 2Fb → Rm₃₅.
The fact that the scalar number of the “Tw” (Twitter) element is greater than the others is not neutral. Indeed, Twitter is likely to be the closest service to Theroom35: on both websites, users are expected to publish some small pieces of text. The first difference is that these pieces of text are more structured on Theroom35. The second crucial difference is that Theroom35 works through closed symmetric networks, what reminds of Facebook's functioning. At last, Theroom35’s design prompts users to experience the service like a classical search engine. That is the very difference compared to Twitter or Facebook, and the reason why Theroom35 may not be labeled as a social networking website. Member pages (or profiles) are not the core of the service, the Room is a common space that prevails over individual entities.

That’s why Theroom35 claims to be a complementary way of publishing and searching information.

Technology

Theroom35 website has been developed with the Ruby on Rails framework. The site is hosted on the Amazon cloud.
Theroom35 does not rely on any technical breakthroughs. The founders claim that they can bring a useful communication tool through a simple interface.

Pre-existing services

Google Social Search

On October 26 2009, Google released a new experimental service in Google Labs called “Google Social Search”.

Social Bookmarking

Social search may be transposed to bookmark sharing services like Digg, Delicious, Reddit… Some of them have purposely converted their positioning towards this area, like StumbleUpon who recasted itself as a social search engine "between Google and Twitter” on October 2009. When asked about the differences with social bookmarking, Adrien answers that Theroom35's process is to make users move online some external information and not relay information from a place to another within the Web.

Symbolism

Name

The name of the website has not changed since the very first version. It reminds the genuine idea of the project.

Logo

At first sight, the logo looks like a megaphone, which embodies the word-of-mouth process that occurs through the Room. One can also see the silhouette of an opening door that invites the users to enter the Room.

Tagline

The tagline “Like it, Spread it. Search it, Find it.” is a reference to the song “Technologic” by the famous French House duo Daft Punk.

Lexicon

The vocabulary used to depict interaction between users on Theroom35 draws a metaphor of a telecommunication network in opposition with the conventions in force on social networking websites.

• Each element of a network is considered as a "node".
• Users can connect with two kinds of nodes: people or “hubs”.
• To connect with a node (or to remove connection), users can “plug in” (or “unplug”).

Comics

The About section of the website displays a picture of each founder with a caption referring to them respectively as "The Batman" and "The Flash".
The pair says that they decided to identify with their favorite superheroes to keep in mind that any regular guys can surpass themselves to achieve their goals, even when the odds seem against them.
Julien has imagined a comic featuring Batman and Flash that provides many hints on the mission of the project, communicated through cultural, artistic and scientific references.
The title of the comic is Theroom35 Origins: Synapsion. It refers to the Marvel movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine and explains that this is the story of Theroom35’s gestation. This comic is made of screenshots from the only episode of a Batman TV series that features both The Batman and The Flash, called A Mirror Darkly (season 5, episode 5, “The Batman”).

To build Theroom35, the duo needs to balance a chemical equation composed by three fictional chemical elements: Twittium (for Twitter), Googline (for Google) and Facebon (for Facebook). Julien has given those elements a virtual existence in the Mendeleev's periodic table, which gives rise to several interpretations. The atomic number of each of those elements, including Theroom, is superior to 118, which is interpreted as an unstable state and a manner to advocate the humility of technology towards nature. Furthermore, the atomic mass of each element is equal to their respective financial valuation (in $billions); except for Theroom, whose mass is replaced by “n/a” (“not applicable”). This reinforces the fact that Theroom35 is still in project phase.

At the end of the story, the cooperating pair managed to balance the equation to make the reaction stable, which gives birth to “Synapsion”, a superhero who has the power to “retrieve information from every single person’s mind and deliver only what you [the user] are interested in”.
The name of this superhero supports the social search notion since it is built on the word “synapse”, which is the chemical element that makes the junction between neurons and enables the nervous signal transmission. The suffix “-ion” might stand as a tribute to South Park's superhero Mysterion who appears in the episode 1302: The Coon. Indeed, the founders are used to relaxing their coding headaches by watching South Park episodes.

Controversy

Language

After the launch of the first private versions, some users complained about the only use of English on the website. They pointed out the fact that since the founders were French, there should at least be two versions. The current version is still only available in English.

Google-like design

Theroom35’s user interface shares several similarities with Google’s. Google received a designed patent for its homepage and search results page on September 2, 2009. When asked about a potential litigation, Julien affirms in jest that Theroom35 is not “the Evil Room”, in reference to a quote Google CEO Eric Schmidt made during a press conference on October, 2009.

External links

• Official website
• Theroom35 Origins: Synapsion