Tweetvisor is one of the users of ContextVoice API. Today we asked Nelu, the developer of Tweetvisor, a few questions about his product, Context Voice and live in general.

Who are you and what do you do for a living?

I am Nelu Lazar, a Romanian living in the US. During regular business hours I am an Electrical Project Engineer, leading remotely an off-shore Romanian team in Brasov to design high performance electronic equipment for large off-highway trucks, locomotives, power generators. Evenings and nights I am a dad of two, a husband, an entrepreneur, a web developer and a social media and networking enthusiast. Traveler, soccer player, musician, biker and more, the rest of the time.

What is Tweetvisor?

Tweetvisor slightly deviated from its original purpose, shaping now more as a web-based interface that extends Twitter’s meaning. It basically is a fully-featured Ajax-powered Twitter client running in The Cloud. Some of its features:

• Manage multiple accounts (personal, corporate etc.)
• Multi-column templates, with auto-refresh (replies, DMs, hot-topic and various timelines)
• Tabbed browsing (each user, trend, hashtag, stock ticker etc. has its own tab)
• Display conversation threads (to better understand friends’ tweets)
• Groups and user Tags (for categorizing your friends)
• Save favorite search topics
• Complex searches, geolocation search, with option to save search query for later use
• Youtube, Vimeo and Metacafe inline thumbs
• TwitPic and Pikchur inline photo previews
• Picture uploads via TwitPic
• Stock tickers links
• Hashtag links
• Mouseover replies opens “in reply to” tweet
• Live Twitter trends list
• Manage followers
• Favorite tweets list
• Inline video replies

How did you find about ContextVoice?

Even though I live far away from my country, I am watching very closely everything that is happening in Romanian online space. I’ve started light personal web projects since late ’90s, when “Transylvania” University’s leda.unitbv.ro and zzn.com hosting service were some accessible tools to play with HTML, but I am more involved in Romanian networking since 2006 when blogs and other social web tools began to be embraced in Romania as well. So this way I’ve initially heard about uberVU and its ascendant path to becoming a very good tool that builds the conversational graph around web comments, reactions and mentions world wide. Recently there was a discussion opened with uberVU and ContextVoice’s founder Vladimir Oane about integrating their API into Tweetvisor’s tweets timelines and the feed reader.

What do you use the ContextVoice API for?

Tweetvisor - Context Voice integration

Thousands of links are being shared every day on Twitter. There is definitely a lot of noise out there, but you’d still like to find out the latest good news and articles, or what people are talking about your brand, company or your blog articles. As a solution to this trend, Tweetvisor is now displaying world wide reactions to any URL shared on Twitter and listed with the web-based application, via newly launched ContextVoice service. Tweetvisor’s integrated Feed Reader also displays ContextVoice’s world wide reactions for every blog posts.

What do you find most exciting about ContextVoice?

ContextVoice makes a very easy task out of tracking comments and reactions for any article URL across the Internet. You can see how your links or keywords are shared, propagated and commented on many web platforms. ContextVoice API is a good tool for personal research, but it is an even powerful tool for brands, companies and organizations that really needs to keep a close eye on what their customers have to say about their business activity or, say, newly launched products.

Is there something we must do to make you happier?

I’ve just implemented the API, and ContextVoice is doing a very good job on Tweetvisor, the integration performs smoothly. There will be a monitoring timeframe for the next few weeks, to observe how Twitter users are following world wide conversations for URLs shared on every tweets. For the near future I am opened to increasing implementation’s capabilities by adding more features that will help people track web reactions they’re interested in.

Final words?

I am very happy ContextVoice and Tweetvisor managed to cooperate very well to accomplish this integration. We both hope people will find these tools helpful for their daily-basis tweeting needs.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Introducing Context Voice (contextvoice.com)
• uberVU brands its API as ContextVoice – launches a free and a paid service (thenextweb.com)
• 7 interesting Twitter tools (en.onsoftware.com)

We rented a car and pretty soon we were introduced to the American driving experience: 4-5 lane motorways full of cars and in Palo Alto, traffic lights every quarter mile.

Getting to the US on the 4th of November also meant landing in the middle of the election. Apart from some people wearing Obama tshirts, there was not much else around us announcing this most important event. Seems like TV reporters are way better than us at spotting these things.

We got to our room, turned on the TV and were happy to watch Obama winning state after state. At least we did that until 7pm, when we fell asleep. That’s a really lame curfew for 20-something year old guys, but hey, it was already 3am in London and 5am in Bucharest.

And next morning, we were meeting really interesting people at the Web 2.0 Summit.

It’s that great time in a company’s life when you really decide what you’re building, and who it’s for, and what’s the best path to change the world with your product and company.

What you realize, though, is that after setting the vision and making all the tough decision, you have to actually build a great product. Vision without execution means nothing.

We couldn’t have built what we have right now without a great group of people that have been working hard with us side by side during the last few months. uberVU got where it is right now thanks to these great guys.

Here they are, in no particular order:



Mihnea – always dependable and a great photographer.



Mihai D – really fun to be around, great addition to the team



Mihai P – really loves to work on difficult problem, search, scaling, architecture and the likes.



Manu – really fun guy that brings the “element of surprise” to the team



Cristi – always willing to work on whatever needs to be done if that helps the team

Thanks guys, we would not have got here without you.

• You add a service to uberVU, such as Blogger or Picasa.
• We get your content, and you can also post
• You can see all the reactions that your content gets on the platforms where it’s posted
• You can then reply directly from uberVU. The comment gets sent to the appropriate service. (If you got a comment on Flickr, your reply will go to Flickr)

We’re really happy about this, as it is a turning point from uberVU. uberVU has taken the first step towards becoming a CONVERSATIONAL PLATFORM. We’re not just a publishing/management platform anymore.

It might seem little at first, but it’s just the first step. We’ve started moving in this direction and we hope we’re on to some great things. You’ll get to experience some over the summer hopefully.

For now, log in to uberVU and give the commenting a try. Feedback highly appreciated.

I have to conform to the 140 characters that have been kindly offered to me by Twitter. I want to post a message to the thread in Facebook Groups, but I can only reply to a single person’s statement. Conversations on the web seem to be trickier than one would expect.

But what are conversations really about? What are you actually doing when having a conversation with someone face to face at your favorite restaurant? You’re talking about SOMETHING with SOMEONE. So what should actually matter to you on the Web is THE SUBJECT, THE PEOPLE and THE CONTEXT. NOT the platform.

The technology doesn’t really matter. Moreover, the technology should be transparent in the conversational Web. All we should see are PEOPLE we want to talk to, and THINGS we want to talk about, connected by a CONTEXT that shows us how the conversation is unfolding.

Some call this the distributed web, but it’s really not. It’s a lot more than that. And I’ll tell you what it’s not also. It’s not FriendFeed and it’s not LifeStreaming. It’s not about seeing your friends’ tweets and pokes in one place.

The interesting Conversational Web that I’m seeing only shows you what matters, the content and the people. And it lets you interact with both without caring, or even knowing where they come from. You may be talking about golf with a friend and about photography with another. The golf friend might be using a regular forum, or even a newsgroup to contribute to the conversation. The photography friend might be using both a blog, a photo sharing site and an IM service to share his opinions and examples. And you wouldn’t know or care about that. You’d see it all the same. All you would care about would be that you’re having a meaningful conversation in a very rich way.

There are a lot of challenges to using this approach. There’s the authentication and security, that OpenID might take care of. There’s the problem of finding a way of showing meaningful information about someone so you know who you’re talking to in that context. If you’re talking about photography lighting techniques, you might find interesting to know that the person you’re talking to is a professional photographer. But you might not care about that if you’re talking about parenting.

There’s also the problem of making all these services work together so that you can actually interconnect them. And there’s always the problem of providing CONTEXT. There are millions of interesting conversations about photography around the Web. How you find out about them, organize them, get them in front of the user and keep track of the participation across platforms is very, very tricky.

I honestly think it can be done and it must be done. The way the Web is going today, I see a flood of noise grouped by way of some social order (Graph, if you may). People keep to their current communities, limiting themselves to the same group of people that say the same uninteresting things. Some friend everybody, flooding themselves with information that they never intend to process and in the end having lots of shallow interactions.

The Conversational Web can be a great thing for us. But it needs a lot more tweaking if we are to be able to have lots of meaningful conversations, meet lots of new great people that we deeply connect with, all without wasting all our time in the process.

Think about it, please.