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 got to dissect our product more than ever before. Interesting questions structured around important themes led to a conference table full of ideas and connections.

We started our journey back in time. First thing was to decide where we wanted to be in one year. What kinds of experiences would uberVU provide. If uberVU was a person, what would it be like?

Moving on we got to the people that wanted to have those experiences, our users. Who are all our possible users, what are their needs and how could they use a product similar to uberVU?

It was then time to face the facts and describe how things are done right now in our market. What experiences do the users have, what technical capabilities are they using and what’s the personality of the products or processes they are using.

The most interesting part was when we had to come up with how things were done before the Internet. How did people fulfill the needs that uberVU will fulfill in a year?

All this process led to an interesting product/user life cycle. It was now clear what stages our product would have to go through to reach its maturity, what the important features were at each stage and what road a user might take from the first encounter to using uberVU every day.

All in all, a very inspiring session and highly recommended for any startup that’s trying go focus and better define what’s important.

Here are the Swede team thoughts on our workshop.

As you may know, we’ve been part of 24 startups presenting on stage at The Next Web ‘08 in Amsterdam. It has been an awesome experience from many points of view. We’ve met a lot of cool people that you may consider superstars: Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch, Robert Scoble, Chris Saad from DataPortability.org, Werner Vogels CTO of Amazon and many more. What strikes you when you meet each of them is the passion for what they are doing and their down-to-earth way of dealing with people.

Honestly, we went there to just get some feedback on uberVU. Feedback from other startups and tech gurus. We loved what we heard. 90% of the people said: “Wow, that’s an awesome idea. It’s the type of product I’d be using every day“. The other 10% said “I don’t understand“. We need to work on the way we communicate, but otherwise, we got great feedback. A lot of people spent 30 to 45 minutes talking to us about uberVU and its potential.

We also took part in a local BarCamp, where we met lots of incredible developers and startups. Really young people that were so passionate about their ideas. Most of them had been working for months, even without getting paid at all, just because they believed in what they were doing. Very inspiring indeed.

We really appreciate that people took the time to check out uberVU and even write about it. If you want to know more about what people think of our product, check out some of the links below:

• Ubervu: participating in communities from one place
• uberVU- Keep All of Your Content in One Place
• uberVU – find, organize, publish
• UberVu – Gestionar toda nuestra Web 2.0 en un solo lugar
• UberVu concentra todas tus redes sociales
• uberVU, Para Manejar Todos Tus Servicios.

Thank you for your kind words, guys. Reviews like these make working for the project that much more rewarding.

Besides speaking about our shinny app we will use this blog to review applications and/or services that we consider to be in some way connected to what we are trying to achieve with uberVU. We will review apps that deal with semantic web, vertical search, open API’s etc.

This week let’s talk about people search! It is a hot topic for us since uberVU will soon integrate social networking data and we work on a way to match profiles among different social platforms. And people search seems to be a good way to achieve that. For my experiment I chose 2 apps: Spock and 123 People. Spock is the creation of Jaideep Singh and Jay Bhatti, two engineers from IBM and Microsoft. Spock got a lot of attention from the press in 2007 and was nominated among Top 10 Web Start-ups by Wired magazine. 123 People, on the other hand, is an Austrian-based start-up backed by i5invest fund. So …. let’s start rolling the ball.
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