You Are There: "gada.be" Is Born

From 1953 to 1957 "the most trusted man in America", Walter Cronkite hosted a historical recreation television show called You Are There. Using the CBS stable of news correspondents, events from the past were covered as though they were today's news. Watching interviews of historical characters like Abraham Lincoln was interesting period television, to be sure.

You may well ask: "What the heck does this have to do with subscription technology?"

Well, I'll tell you, because I was there.

As I mentioned in my first post to this blog, I was sitting in an industry summit a few weeks ago with Chris Pirillo and Rajesh Setty when I decided to create this blog. It was at this same event that I sat next to Chris while he sat muttering "Gotta be... gada.be... Yeah. Yeah! It works! Check this out!!!"

Not completely understanding his enthusiasm as he frenetically pounded away at his Sony PSP, Chris explained to me what he was prototyping. Well, that first digital spark of life is what became his just-launched "metasearch service" called gada.be.

Gada.be is one of the coolest feed-based web applications I have seen.

Here's how it works. Type the following into your browser of choice:

http://kip.meacham.gada.be/

And gada.be gives you back the top results about me from Yahoo! News, Google Blogs, MSN, Ice Rocket and other search tools. The content comes back as a single page, and you can view or subscribe to the results in RSS.

Now replace my name with the name of your company, your product, your service, and see what happens... (Note to marketeers: Spend a few minutes and figure out how to leverage this. Tie your company web page's "on-the-go" content, and you can quickly capitalize on some elegantly simple subscription marketing.)

Having watched Chris work on this from his PSP, the time-savings for smartphone/PDA users become immediately self-evident: Thumb a little, point-and-click to a lot. No more Carpal 'Thumbal' Syndrome. My poor, Treo-wearied digits are already offering prayers of gratitude.

Subscription technology history in the making, I believe; and to think I watched its birth! I was there! I guess this makes Raj and me the gadafathers, huh?

Ya gada love it! Nicely done, Chris!