I’ve been very busy lately dealing with Twitter, but I’ve made some time to stop by SFBeta and earlier this evening, the OpenDNS party at fluid. Both were decent; OpenDNS was more of a mixer, and SFBeta, chock full o’ demos.

SFBeta was what you’d expect – Lots of industry folk, barely any food left if you showed up past 5:50pm or so (they opened at 5pm!), lots of people pushing random product at you, and not a hell of a lot of good technology. Most of it? Pointless, but every time I go, though, there’s at least one company showing a worthy technology.

i give you, search me:

A few months ago, it was PicLens, and this time, in the “we use and love coverflow” technology vein that PicLens is part of, it’s SearchMe.

They’re combining cover flow, Internet search, and a topic specific, topic sensitive system that displays categorical icons at the top of the page. The stacks feature allows you to drag and drop pages into a cohesive stack, share them with people on Digg, Twitter, and nearly every social networking site out there.

Give it a try – their developer tells me they are using their own crawler, which I think is a bad idea. I worked at Inktomi for a few years and I know how difficult it is to scale search. Their plight, in the face of Google and Microsoft, will not be any easier.