LSQHA Blog Reviews

Just about a year ago, Twazzup launched one of the more interesting Twitter search engines and one month ago, it became one of the first services to get access to Twitter's full firehose stream. Today, the company is launching its first new service based on this full Twitter stream: Twazzup Insights . Insights is a real-time Twitter analytics service that displays a lot of interesting data about any given keyword, as well as a list of the most influential Twitter users that use this keyword. In addition, Twazzup is also launching its web-based Twitter client Twazzup Reader out of beta. Sponsor Twazzup Insights The new analytics service is still in private alpha testing, but a couple of teaser reports on the site already show the application's potential. Besides displaying the number of tweets and retweets about a given keyword per hour, the service also highlights the top links about this topic, as well as a list of the top influencers, as well as the most often used hashtags and other keywords in these tweets. In addition, Twazzup Insights also performs a basic sentiment analysis on these tweets. If you would like to get early access to this service, you can use the request form on Twazzup Insights , or send an email to info[at]twazzup[dot]com. Twazzup Reader Twazzup Reader looks similar to Brizzly , but offers a number of interesting features that set it apart from the competition. Besides offering all the standard Twitter features (lists, search etc.), Twazzup Reader also shows images and short text snippets from all the links that appear in your stream. In addition, you can also filter every stream, including lists and persistent searches, by posts with images and videos. Whenever you are feeling especially helpful, you can also highlight all the messages that include a question. Overall, Twazzup Reader is a very capable web-based Twitter client and definitely worth a try. Discuss

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Twazzup Launches New Twitter Analytics Service and Web-Based Twitter Client

For the past few days, we attended SAS and SugarCRM user conferences in Seattle and San Francisco. These are just a few of the observations that comes from conversations with developers, business managers, product managers, entrepreneurs and executive management. At both companies, you see the influence of social technologies in the discussions and what their partners are offering. With this social wave comes a variety of new methods to crack the biggest nut: "The most effective way to organize, discover and share information." We've been pounding on that last issue for the past week. We have numerous examples for how web applications can be aggregated into environments like SugarCRM but its the complexity of organizing that data which becomes the biggest challenge. Sponsor The consumer social networks give people lots of ways to use applications. For example, Twitter is a hub for delivering messages to external sites from the application or services such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic. It is a bridge for external services that provide data services that aggregate Twitter data to be uses for specific uses. Recommendation services like Mr. Tweet provide a person with references to other people the individual may want to follow. The enterprise is a different beast. It is not the most popular for the hungry young entrepreneurs and developers we met at companies like Twillio Tuesday night on the eve of Chirp, the Twitter developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Still, in conversations there, we met a few people who are developing for the enterprise environment. What they bring is a fresh look at how the social technologies apply in a world where compliance issues abound, complex processes rule the day and knowledge often exists in ERP silos and email archives. What these young people see are front-end tools like Google Wave that serve as the foundation for collaborative services. These are platforms, for instance, that seek to eliminate email from the process. These young developers create a certain effect. They've developed ways to organize and share information that the enterprise accepts. So much so that the giants have developed their own services, again, in many respects, inspired by the developers building web oriented platforms. And it is having a transformative effect. On Sunday night, we sat in a conference hall at the Washington Convention Center. It was the 35th anniversary of the SAS Users Conference. It was our first time attending. Twitter was the focal part of the opening. Large screens showed the Twitter updates. Their vice president of marketing used his time on stage to push out his second tweet...ever. The singing group even tried to collaborate with the crowd to create an improvised song from their Twitter stream. We learned the next day that this was a first for SAS. Twitter and the variety of other social technologies in the market are giving this conservative, data analytics company a new view, best illustrated in the launch this week of its Social Media Analytics platform. It's a complete, powerful service that takes structured and unstructured data from social networks, applies it to preset rules and delver the results in a dashboard environment. It's lacking a certain level of automation. It's not self-service by any means. It requires SAS to do the analysis and then present it through a web site. But that's okay. The service acts as a pivot that gives SAS the capability to move into new markets. It moves them from the back of the deal to the front of the deal. In the back of the deal, for instance, SAS helps analyze customer guarantees. They do a lot more than that but it's an example of the textual analysis the company provides. Now they have greater access to the front side of the deal to. They can use the platform to reach into agencies where they can help customers craft brand strategies. That should have an effect all of its own. It gives SAS the opportunity to interact with marketers, designers and UI specialists. They may recruit a few people or take the knowledge inside the company and turn it into something. That should help SAS improve the Social Media Analytics platform, making it a service that is more easily available for users to do more on their own. At SugarCon, the story is also a social one. Perhaps best summed up in the second day keynote by Paul Greenberg: "Do You Really Have To Worry About the Social Customer?" I am not so sure you have to worry about a social customer. But it might be a good idea to get know them a little bit better so you can build on your own transformations, whatever they may be. Discuss

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From Seattle to San Francisco, Social is Everything

This morning's presentations from Chirp , Twitter's developer conference, have showcased the growth and the innovation of the service. A few of the statistics announced this morning include: Sponsor Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users 300,000 new users sign up per day Approximately 60% of them are coming from outside the U.S Twitter receives 180 million unique visitors per month 75% of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications 60% of all tweets come from third-party apps Since the new Blackberry application was launched, it has accounted for 7 to 8% of new sign Twitter now has 175 employees, up from 25 one year ago There are 600 million search queries on Twitter per day There are over 100,000 Twitter applications Twitter gets 3 billion requests a day through its API 37% of active Twitter users use their phone to tweet While the company is making several announcements at Chirp, including the archival of all public tweets since 2006 with the Library of Congress, these statistics confirm the impressive growth and potential of Twitter. Discuss

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Just the Facts: Statistics from Twitter Chirp

URL shortener bit.ly has announced some simple user interface changes for its standard users and a whole series of new features for paid users, including custom domain names and statistics. While the standard user interface changes are neat, it's the "end-to-end branding" that we're actually looking forward to, as it should take a bit of that mystery meat feel out of our day to day online lives. Sponsor The biggest changes standard bit.ly users will see is the searchable history, which allows users to search through URLS they have added. Bit.ly has also tried to make it easier to manage the links you've added by adding a specific "Manage" section, which will show all the links with basic statistics on each, such as Twitter conversations and clicks. And all of a user's shared links will be available in RSS format. As for the bit.ly's pro users, the service will begin offering a traffic dashboard, short domain redirection, unlimited API calls and, most importantly, a full "end-to-end branding". End-to-end branding means that if someone goes to shorten a New York Times URL, for example, they will end up with a link containing the nyti.ms short link instead of a standard bit.ly link. This will happen for all users, whether they shorten the link through the bit.ly website or through third-party Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, Twitterfeed and ÜberTwitter. While this type of service is not only great for the website, its useful for the users too, because you don't have to blindly click on a shortened link. It keeps everything short and sweet for our Twitter character limit while giving us, the user, some clue of where we're going. Discuss

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Bit.ly Pro Takes the Mystery Out of Shortened URLs

The Website Taste Predictor is a new Twitter tool that analyzes your Twitter account in order to recommend websites you would like. The project uses Twitter's OAuth authentication protocol to access your Twitter account so you don't have to enter in your username and password in order to try it out. How exactly it works, we can't say. There's no "about" page, "FAQ" or other explanation. In fact, there's not even a credit as to who made it, only a URL. But the URL is a big hint: it's hosted on the MIT.edu domain underneath the subheading ~peretti. And just who is ~peretti? Only the co-founder of the Huffington Post and the viral tracker BuzzFeed , Jonah Peretti . Sponsor New Twitter Tool From HuffPo and BuzzFeed Co-Founder? Peretti is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, has taught at NYU and the Parsons School of Design, consulted for major brands like Sony Pictures and Procter & Gamble and created several viral experiments like the Nike sweatshop email and FundRace.org . However, he's best known for co-founding BuzzFeed , The Huffington Post , ContagiousMedia.org , and the Eyebeam Open Lab . So if this "Website Taste Predictor" is also his creation (we've contacted him to confirm), you know it's not going to be your run-of-the-mill Twitter tool. For what it's worth, we're nearly 100% sure about Peretti's involvement. The tool is hosted under his account on MIT's servers , he tweeted about it back on April 7th and he responded personally to a comment about it over on Digg (the fact that this post never hit homepage it a testament to all that is going wrong over there). However, while these clues seem to point to Peretti as the creator, you can never be too sure. We'll wait for an official word and will update accordingly. Website Taste Predictor in Action So what does the Taste Predictor actually do? Well, it doesn't just parse your Twitter history to spit back a list of links you've tweeted. That would be too easy. It appears to delve deeper than that to function as a true recommendation engine. Whether it looks at keywords, follower lists or sites related to those you post links to, we can't be sure, but we do know this: the app gets it right on the money. And I mean downright scary right. In my case, for example, the list returned included a large group of sites I read regularly consisting mainly tech-focused blogs and mainstream media sites plus a handful of sites I've been known to check out less often. What I don't know is how it figured out that I've been known to gaze at the occasional lolcat , fail photo , web comic or celebrity