After many months of hard labor, I am emerging victorious with my first large-scale web application called Rankaroo. Rankaroo helps you organize your interests, share them with others, and connect with like-minded people. Everyone is a guru at something. Whether it’s that you know about ski lodges in the Alps or Greek Mythology or Hip Hop, whatever it is you have something to keep organized and share with the world. As we each share our interests we all benefit from mutual discovery.

In the traditional browser way of storing your favorites, you would put your favorites in a hierarchical set of folders and hope that you can remember where you put them later. A few years ago, some sites like del.icio.us introduced the idea of eliminating the hierarchy and using tags instead (basically words). But while this makes it easier to find things later, it’s relatively difficult to find a cross section of these tags, plus you basically throw out your normal grammar in favor of an alphabet soup of words.

Rankaroo is based strongly on the Connect-by-Clicks technology. Connect-by-Clicks is a system that turns simple language into connective tissue. It works as following.

You want to categorize the following web site. http://espn.go.com
Just type a simple phrase. For instance. espn sports news and scores

What Connect-by-Clicks does is creates interconnections between these words. So, later you could find this favorite by going to sports -> scores or espn -> news or espn -> sports -> scores.

While this is cool in itself, it’s not nearly as cool as when hundred of people are all doing the same. If my friend, Joe, enters a favorite on his basketball team and categorizes it by the phrase knicks basketball team scores, if I was searching for scores, I would find out about his basketball team.

You’ll have to experience the power of Connect-by-Clicks yourself to see what I mean.