ROLLYO - Pretty Cool, But Will it Last

Every now and then a site or tool comes around that seems pretty cool, but runs its course pretty quickly and then gets forgotten about. Orkut is a great example of this. Back when it launched as an invitation only site, people rushed to it in droves. But once everyone got there, it was sort of like the party where everyone stands around saying "what now?" I haven't logged on to my own Orkut account in months. Today, I found mention of another cool looking spot in John Battelle's blog. Will ROLLYO turn into something people can't live without, or will the initial rush come fast and furious only to burn out down the road?

ROLLYO is sort of a combination of personalized search, RSS reader and networking community all rolled into one. Users join up and create their own "Searchroll" of frequently used sites. Then, when they want to go looking for something, they can use ROLLYO to search only the sites that they've already selected. Users can share their Searchrolls with others, so there's going to be a little bit of hype about having the most popular and respected Searchroll around.

The concept is a sound one. While I couldn't live without BlogLines (my RSS reader) as far as keeping up with the dozens of sites I read daily, there are times when I want to know who's talking about a specific topic. Some days, I don't have time to cover every story that breaks, so I look to link to someone that I trust for their commentary. Right now that means sorting through RSS feeds one at a time, or running a Google News search and trying to find someone I'm willing to link to. With ROLLYO, it should be as simple as loading up a list of all the sites I trust, and then running a search there for the topic I'm looking for.

Time will tell, and it's a big stumbling block to manually enter all the URLs that you want to have searched. If ROLLYO is going to be useful to me, I'm going to need to get a hundred or so sites listed. The idea of looking up the URL of each one and entering it into my list isn't a fun one, but the functionality of the search may overshadow that.

In the meantime, if you'd like to check out ROLLYO and set up your own Searchroll, you can do so at: http://www.rollyo.com/