ContextVoice is an API that tracks comments from social sites around a URL close to real-time.

If a certain story, picture or video gets shared on social sites, we get the mentions and comments from those social sites around that specific story, picture or video.

Why it’s important

Conversations leave the site where they first started more and more often. With the rise of social networks such as Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook, a growing number of people choose to participate in conversations on the sites where they feel the most comfortable.

This means that conversations are becoming more fragmented. Publishers lose comments, the same community gets split apart and it’s difficult to participate in and follow this whole conversation.

By tracking this whole conversation in one place in close to real-time you get:

• more engaging content around stories
• access to a larger community than that present on your site
• important data and metadata around your content that you can use to develop better or new offerings for your customers

It’s all about the data and the community.

The more data you have, the better insights you can deliver to your employees and customers. The more people brands can engage with in a social environment, the more engaged that community gets and the more trust is created.

In the end, it’s all about delivering high value to your customers. By giving them access to a larger community and to better intelligence and insights, you make them more successful. And you become more successful.

How it works

The ContextVoice API is RESTful and provides responses in both XML and JSON formats.

You can use the API to:

• tell us about a URL (or batch of URLs) you want to track – chances are we already have it in our system as we keep track of the hottest stories from services like Twitter, Digg, Reddit etc…
• get comments around a specific URL we’re already tracking.

What we track

We track comments on the following services:

• Major blogging platforms (Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, MovableType)
• Microblogging platforms (Twitter)
• Lifestreaming services (FriendFeed)
• Social news sites (Digg, Reddit, HackerNews)
• Social bookmarking sites (Del.icio.us)
• Videosharing sites (YouTube, Vimeo)
• Photosharing sites (Flickr, Picasa)
• Mainstream media (NYTimes)

How that works

You tell ContextVoice what you want to track and we start gathering comments from the social Web.

If the URL you sent us is part of a publishing platform we support, we’ll get comments from that platform too, on top of the default blog and social site comments we get.

If the URL is not part of a publishing platform we support, we’ll just get comments around it from blogs and social sites.

Technology

Why use ContextVoice instead of building your own solution?

1. 2,000,000 links are shared on Twitter daily. 1,000,000 new blog post are created each day, with at least as many comments. Tracking all of these distributed conversations is very difficult and resource intensive. Only a small part of these is actually relevant to you, so tracking all the Social Web in order to find the relevant ones does not make economic sense.
2. The hardware and software infrastructure needed in order to crawl conversations and comments is difficult to create, deploy and maintain. It takes a long time to develop, it’s costly and difficult to maintain. We’ve already done that for you, it’s our core business. We’ve made it our core business so that you can focus on yours and still reap the rewards provided by conversation monitoring.
3. Using the world-class solution provided by ContextVoice will probably cost you less than a single programmer’s salary for a year. Additional yearly maintenance costs can, by themselves, go higher than your yearly investment in ContextVoice. Instead of hiring people to venture on a risky, long-term, non-core project, you could be harnessing the power of the social Web in days with ContextVoice.
4. On demand web services are the future. You don’t host and run your own search engine and you don’t produce your own electricity, because it’s not core to what you do. By using ContextVoice, you reduce risks associated with new projects, eliminate opportunity costs and go to market within days, not months or years.