(...) Not only is the service not yet open to the public — although Volunia promises a hundred thousand users will be let in today — but the hour-long press conference to launch the site was held entirely in Italian, struggled with technical problems and had very little in the way of actual demos to show us what the service really did.
(...) Volunia is a search engine that indexes and maps out the web and then ranks it through a mixture of algorithms and the opinions of visitors. Marchiori alluded to the fact that it was intended to be like GPS for the web — but said it does not use semantic technology.
At the same time, Volunia provides a place for social interaction in a sidebar that lets users talk to each other and to the owners of the websites they are visiting; a service that seems to be half chatroom, half SideWiki, the universal commenting engine introduced — and then killed — by Google.
(...) First, there is the simple question of whether it can live up to its own hype. The approach taken so far leaves it wide open to criticism of over-promising, with Volunia doing some serious PR ahead of the launch, mainly with the Italian press and odd little pre-announcements.
(...) The Volunia team, backed by serial entrepreneur Mariano Pireddu, may be playing down their attempt to revolutionize the world. Marchiori explicitly told journalists at the press conference “not to expect the moon”.
But evidence suggests they think they can make a significant impact.