Krugle: the next Kiko
2006-10-05 17:29:02
Google launched Google Code today. It looks pretty good. It's not as nice as Krugle, but I don't think that matters. I think Krugle is about to be the next Kiko: sold on eBay or to someone for pocket change. I have no idea how Krugle planned to monetize a code search in any real way. I suppose if slashdot and digg can survive on advertising, then Krugle might have made a reasonable go of it. They probably had more ambitious plans: I'm sure they thought about it a lot more than the 15 minutes I spent.
The real problem is that what Krugle is doing is right in Google's wheelhouse: manipulating their massive corpus with their hundreds of thousands of CPUs. (Gosh, that sounds a little dirty.) Kiko's problem was that they were a little dog playing in the street where Google and Microsoft are playing a game of chicken in dump trucks. "Sorry, Kiko, didn't see you down there."
The one thing Krugle has going for it is this: since they target the developer community, it won't be that hard to spread awareness that they exist. So they can position themselves as the little guy against Goliath. I think in the market of developers, that actually can make some difference. I really hope they can pull it off.