Conversations are becoming the fabric of the social web. Millions of people are commenting everywhere about everything. With the rise of services like Twitter, this is happening faster and faster, in close to real time.

Tapping into these conversations and communities, although difficult technically, is not something new. There are dozens of companies out there offering buzztracking services for marketing, PR and advertising professionals based on these online conversations.

However, as social media has become mainstream and social business software has become more widespread, some interesting changes have started to happen.

1. First of all, social media tracking is becoming a commodity. There are a lot of free tools out there that are doing a good job at tracking all of this. Also, a lot of people are starting to use these tools, even outside of professional circles. People track their names, their friends, their favorite bands or companies on Twitter and on blogs. They’ve started to take social media for granted.
2. Secondly, as social business software proliferates, more people at lower levels of the organization are starting to make the use of social media central to their work. They’re talking to people inside and outside of the organization and need tools to track and manage all those conversations.
3. Thirdly, as Fred Wilson states, a new layer of social media is emerging. This new layer works on top of existing platforms (social networks, blog comments, Twitter) to provide valuable data, insights and analytics. As this new layer takes shape, the underlying data it’s based on should become easier to track in real time, making data gathering a commodity.

Right now every company that wants to tap into social media conversations either to create a new product or to use that data internally has to develop crawling software and hardware infrastructure that’s complicated to build and very costly to run. Crawling is not their core business, yet they have to do it. This is, of course, highly inefficient, like having every company building and providing its own internet connection or ERP software.

This is where ContextVoice comes in. We feel that social media conversations will become as widespread as e-mail, even inside businesses. Using social media daily in your work and personal life will take an even more central role. With thousands of conversations happening this second, crawling, analyzing, filtering and making sense of the data will not be easy, but it will be essential.

The ContextVoice API delivers close to real time conversations as a service, because crawling and filtering are just a necessary evil if they’re not the core business. We think social media conversations are a commodity that companies and individuals should be able to tap into cheaply and effectively and that’s our purpose.