Bot News
MetaRun Provides True Web Partnerships

By Brian Proffitt

If you get one thing out of reading this review, it should be this: MetaRun is not a shopping comparison bot. Rather, it is one of the most impressive pieces of agent technology I have seen in a very long time.

The brilliance of MetaRun's technology is that you hardly know it's there, at least from the outside looking in. And that's exactly what the developers of this unique software want you to experience.

So what does this technology do? Essentially, it uses agent-oriented technology to allow different Web sites to interact with each other as if a human being were doing all of the surfing.

If this doesn't seem very exciting, just take a look at the company's first public implementation of its work: the shopping section of the Money.net Web site.

Upon first glance, it's very easy to look at this site and think "pfft. Just another shopping site." I myself made this assumption when I clicked into the site last week. But never assume anything, a lesson I was reminded of after delving a bit deeper into this site.

True, it looks and feels like shopping comparison technology, but you get your first hint that something is different here when you run your first search and a little dialog pops up and tells you its running a real time search, which not every comparison bot will do.

When you find a product you are interested in, you can click on the View Product Description link. Now another dialog box will appear asking you if you want to use MetaRun to handle the transaction. Say yes, and you will be taken to a new window displaying the product's page on the home commerce site, just as you would with any other comparison service.

If you chose to use MetaRun to handle the transaction, here's where it gets interesting. When you click on the purchase option in the commerce site's window, you are now taken to MetaRun's Checkout Cart, not the commerce site's cart. The initial benefit of this service is you can now go off and search for any other product in any other commerce site and have it added to the same shopping cart.

Instead of hitting one site for books, one for computers, and one for electronics--you can now purchase products from all three in one transaction.

If it were just a shopping service, I could leave off there and recommend this as one to try.

Except it's not shopping comparison technology. This implementation is just the tip of the iceberg of where MetaRun can go--which is every where a human being can go on the Web.

What MetaRun is providing to customers such as Money.net is a platform that "uses agents to interact with completely different Web sites," according to Daniel Kraft, Founder and CEO of MetaRun. With this agent technology, the possibility for real and functional Web partnerships becomes much easier, since the integration of differing technologies often makes this a difficult proposition.

In the current economic slowdown, Kraft explained, a lot of dot.coms and traditional companies are looking to form partnerships more than ever. But their sometimes incompatible technologies on their electronic storefronts means that many times the participants in these partnerships are forced to move their sites to a common standard, such as XML, just to work together.

Kraft sees MetaRun as a middleware solution to this problem. Since the agents can navigate the front ends of any Web site (albeit much faster) as a human would, then backend incompatibilities no longer matter.

This human-like navigation, which includes everything from page requests to form manipulation, is accomplished with MetaRun's ADAM technology, which stands for Atom Driven Agent Methodology. "Atom" comes from the way agents handle all of these Web sites: in an atomic manner.

Simply put, Kraft explained, all Web processes are deconstructed down to atomic events. An HTTP GET request is one example of such an atomic event. Using ADAM, "our agents can accomplish any task a human can accomplish," Kraft said.

Any task? What if a site decides to completely change the methodology in which it functions? This is not a problem, Kraft said, as "MetaRun is capable of lightly and gently monitoring changes on Web sites." The emphasis is on lightly and gently, because Kraft does not want commerce sites slammed with bot hits any more than the commerce sites do.

What is important to note here is that MetaRun is not just a commerce solution. It can work for travel, corporate benefit, and insurance sites, just to name a few. Any kind of Web site, informational or transactional, can be used with MetaRun's agents.

The huge potential of this kind of system becomes quite clear when looking at recent figures released by Booz Allen that point to an astonishing low ad click-through rate of 0.25% for Web users. Banner ad benefits are coming into question, Kraft said, because it appears that people remain loyal to their regular Web sites, particularly portals.

Using MetaRun, portal sites can now offer their users the ability to directly interact with different sites (be they shopping, travel, etc.) directly from the portal site. In this way, portal sites can increase traffic to partner sites with far more success than a banner ad, thus generating more revenue for both sites.

This new type of revenue potential is what will drive MetaRun to work with Web sites who want to partner but until now have not had the technical means.

The implications of this bot-as-human technology should be a thing to watch in the months ahead, as new ways to enhance human experiences on the Web are announced by MetaRun.