With the effluence of Tweets over Michael Jackson's death and the Iranian presidential election, Twitter was once again vaulted to the spotlight as the communications medium unmatched by no other. Its search engine has spawned a number of real-time search engine copycats, trying to solve the problem of how to find what's happening about you and your interests now! Scoopler, backed by Y Combinator, is one such real-time search engine. In this segment, we offer our views on Scoopler, its opportunities, challenges and the market overall. Once again, Jeff Smith, CEO and co-founder of Smule, was our guest host. 

We're excited to have Smith once again. 

Smith is one of those rare breeds who can deliver substantive comments and out-of-the-box insights with a bit of dry wit and sense of humor. Importantly, he's had a couple successful exits. He founded and took Tumbleweed public and he founded Envoy, which he sold to Novell. So, we figured he'd know a thing or two about advising young startups. 

I won't list the observations here. Suffice it to say, we love the category. But to become a big success in search requires significant volume, and significant financing. And, finding the business model will be tricky. Even Twitter hasn't figured that one out yet. We suggested that Scoopler founder AJ Asver talk to David Sifry, who founded Technorati, a search engine for the long-tail, which eventually became an advertising network.

We also discuss competition. Real-time search - which was barely understood a year ago - is all the rage today.  There's just-released Collecta, OneRiot, Topsy.com, Almost.at, Crowd-eye and FriendFeed, which recently integrated a search feature. In many ways, Scoopler is also Kosmix writ small. 

All this said, Asver did a nice job delivering his pitch. Short and sweet and succinct. He seems to understand the company's value proposition. So, Scoopler is worth keeping an eye on.

As Smith said: "Have at it, AJ."