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.

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.

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.

How it works

Well! You input a name and the service gathers information from all over the cloud: social networks, wikis, google search etc… And it displays all the information on a single page that you can then edit by adding details about a person.

Are you looking for someone famous?

One thing I noticed and were pretty disappointed about was that search usually works for famous people. It works for Paris Hilton or Bill Gates, but if you search a “not so famous” dude you would probably find nothing. The same about searching for your own name.
And this is a big big problem. Because the value of this service, for me at least, is the ability to extract information from the cloud about a person that I know almost nothing about. If all you can do is dig information about super-starts why not use Wikipedia or simply Google?
The fact that the most searched people are stars also makes me believe that displaying telephone and address is a bad idea. You can not find the phone number of Steve Jobs.

Context, context, context

Context is everything. From my experience I rather search for Microsoft than for Bill Gates. And I expect that the service to be smart enough to make the difference between a company and a name. Spock works great in that regard. It finds people connected to a company, an event etc. 123Pople on the other hand is not so precise. Search for Microsoft and the results will be very strange. I finds some pictures and then it displays some people with Microsoft in their names etc. Not very intuitive.
But although Spock does such a good job at identifying context it has no idea about filtering. I mean: I want to find people connected to Microsoft that are attending a conference in my area. That will be super cool.

Conclusion and future development

People search is an interesting area to keep under observation. Spock is clearly a more mature product but it needs more features until it could go mainstream. What could make me become a fan of any of these products:

• long tail indexing. I would appreciate if I could find coherent information about a rather not so popular person.
• API for integration of the product with web apps like on demand CRMs.
• matching. We have so many connections embedded in social networks comments, blog posts. I would love that someone organize this social stream.
• add follow option. What I mean? If I am searching for a person I’ve met a few days ago at a party it would be so cool to find where this guy publishes information and to have the possibility to follow him on some of the services I use:Facebook, Twitter or RSS feed.

What is your experience with people search? Is it something you regularly use?