As Bill Gates was busy this week giving his talk at the Consumer Electronics Show 2008 at Las Vegas, showing the gadget that will collect all information about any object when it is pointed to that (like pointing to a theater will give all the information about the movies running etc. etc..); Jimmy Wales was preparing hard to launch Wikia Search. On its launching, he says "Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And we are making it open source. Wikia Search will start to change search from being proprietary, top-down, and closed." The intitial reports of the launch has been eupherius in the Wikipedia Followers Community. Although there has been some nasty welcome remarks on it after the alpha release.
Wikia Search has two strikes against it, in a way: the first is that it wants to compete with Google, the $180-billion behemoth that pretty much owns the online search business. And the second is that Wikia Search comes from Jimmy Wales, with his fame as the founder of the "open source" encyclopedia known as Wikipedia. That's a pretty tough act to follow...
We will watch the unfolding of it in coming months; with perhaps the beta release coming soon. Nonetheless the claimed open platform with social networking features buit in will be intersting to use as an user.
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