The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘topsy’

We wrote that Twitturly filled a bit of a void when it was launched in April 2008 as a sort of Techmeme for all that gets linked on Twitter. Much of the initial excitement over its link tracking abilities ebbed away rather swiftly regardless, and competitors like Tweetmeme and Topsy have stolen much of Twitturly’s thunder since its launch.

Joel Strellner, who started the project, finally put Twitturly up for sale on Flippa ten days ago, and the auction just ended. Only five bids came in, and the sale ultimately netted no more than $8,500 – Strellner was hoping for double that amount.

Now, to be fair, Strellner has moved on to other things in the past few months and acknowledges that little attention has been paid to the service for a while, but the low selling price is still undeniably a bit of a bummer for him and his team. Despite a PageRank 6 and an Alexa rank of 40,106, Twitturly only attracted about 1,000 unique visitors per day, and that’s not even enough to warrant anyone to start thinking about monetization.

It’s unclear who the winning bidder is, but he or she is getting the codebase for the site, one month of support from Strellner, some domain names and 622 GB of data.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Real time search and discovery engine Topsy is releasing a bunch of new products and tools this afternoon.

Topsy is all about the power of the ReTweet on Twitter. When the service first launched publicly in May we noted that ReTweets are the new currency of the web. And it isn’t just the number of retweets that matters (which is subject to large scale spamming efforts). It’s the authority of the people doing the retweeting, too.

One way Topsy is distinguishing itself from competitors like OneRiot and TweetMeme is by holding on to data forever. Most real time search engines are focused on right now, which is exactly what people want. But they dump data periodically, and anyone looking for older stuff won’t be able to find it. Here’s a sample search for “skype andreessen” on OneRiot (4 resutls), TweetMeme (0 results) and Topsy (37 pages of results, which can be sorted and filtered by time). So when you want to look up old Tweets around a link, Topsy has the data that no one else is currently showing.

Topsy TopLinks

Today Topsy is releasing new lists of top links being shared on Twitter at any given time. The product is called Topsy TopLinks. There are lists for the Top 100, Top 1,000 and Top 5,000 links. You can also search within the lists – example.

Users can grab RSS feeds for TopLinks, or even feeds for searches within TopLinks.

Like Bit.ly Now and TweetMeme, Topsy TopLinks is a great way to see what’s hot on Twitter right now. And by using influence they cut out the spammy stuff.

Topsy ReTweet Button

Topsy is now offering a Wordpress plugin that gives sites a TweetMeme-like retweet button. And it also shows any badges earned for the URL in TopLinks. Here’s how it looks:

Advanced Query Syntax

Among the other changes at Topsy, the site now supports new advanced search queries.

from: – e.g. ‘from:Topsy influence’

Using this search query will limit your results to links about ‘influence’ that were posted by the Topsy account.

site: – e.g. ’site:techcrunch.com Topsy’

Using this search query will limit your results to links on the TechCrunch site that are about Topsy.

site: – e.g. ’site:eu.techcrunch.com twitter’

Using this search query will limit your results to links on the EU version of the TechCrunch site that include the term ‘twitter’.

site: – e.g. ’site:wired.com/gadgets twitter’

Using this search query will limit your results to links that are within the gadgets section of the the wired.com site and include the term ‘twitter’.

We remain big fans of Topsy. They are amassing a huge long term database of popular links from Twitter, and allowing search and discovery against those links based on advanced search techniques and the idea of influence among Twitter users. The company is based in San Francisco, has 16 employees and has raised $15 million in venture funding.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

I just got my hands on the the Twitter Peek aka the Tweek and I’m trying to figure out who, specifically, this is for. First, consider this my review: this device is not very good if you’re a Twitter “power user” like myself or anyone else with maybe 100+ followers and a few hundred folks you follow. To be clear, this isn’t quite Peek’s fault as they’re clearly not interested in pleasing folks like you and me. They’re looking for folks from a different aviary, presumably new Twitter users who haven’t quite gotten hooked but are interested in the service enough to stick with it and have $199 burning a hole in their pockets absolutely right now and don’t really follow very many people. If you know any of those people, please send them to Amazon to pick this up.

For the rest of us, this thing is pretty rough. I follow 2104 people and so this thing was buzzing and Tweeting all afternoon until I finally turned it off. Weird batches of tweets would come in, all from one person, for example, or weird messages like “Oh Hey, you’re Tweeting so much! We’re going to try to catch up” or something to that effect. It’s also really slow. You have to click twice to read a Tweet - once to bring up the menu and once to read the Tweet - and scrolling is really bad. And it makes a buzzing and a tweeting noise when tweets come in - which is all the time. And it’s $99 with 6 months free or $199 for life. And it only does Twitter. No email. No texting. I’m really selling this thing, aren’t I?

While there have been many real-time search engine launches over the past few months (Scoopler, Topsy, Collecta, CrowdEye), most of them so far have fizzled (see Google Website Trends chart above). After an initial burst of curiosity, interest tends to dive. One exception, however, is OneRiot, which appears to be gaining some early traction in the real-time search race.

This race has just begun, of course, and other real-time search startups are chasing hard. But OneRiot is already serving up results for more than one million search queries a day (see chart below). This would be a rounding error for any major search engine, but at least it is going in the right direction. Its investors think so. They ponied up another $7 million in a new round at the end of last month

OneRiot started to be noticed when it added link search from Twitter last May. But its search volume didn’t really take off until it launched its API, allowing other sites to tap into its real-time search and add it as a feature to their own Web app or site. OneRiot has 40 API partners, including Microsoft (sometimes bundled with IE)., browser add-ons Yoono and Shareaholic, and desktop apps like Nambu and EventBox.

All of these API partnerships add up. In fact, about 80 percent of OneRiot’s searches are coming through its APIs rather than directly on its site. OneRiot is building up market share by offering real-time search to others. (Rival Collecta is preparing to do the same thing by offering its own APIs soon). Search is a volume game, where the more search queries you can process, the better your results become. So OneRiot wants to power as many real-time searches as possible.

To the extent that OneRiot can familiarize people with the concept of real-time search in as many places as possible, that’s a good thing. But ultimately it needs to drive people back to OneRiot.com where it can control the entire experience (and the cash).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

New search engine Topsy, which has been in stealth development for three years, launches, well, now.

Before Google, search engines like AltaVista determined relevance based on how well a web page matched the query. Then came Google, which views the web as a network of documents. Today, all search engines analyze linking behavior around the web. When a web page is linked to a lot, it’s given more influence than other pages competing for attention around the same topics/keywords. Jeff Jarvis summed it all up nicely in 2005 “In this new world, links are currency. Links grant authority. Links build branding. Links equal value.” There’s lots more to it, but the notion that links create value is what drives Internet search.

Well, it’s no longer 2005. Back then blogs were giving Google fits because of how fast and irregularly they updated. Google had to make decisions on how often to index pages. Indexing is expensive, so there’s a tradeoff. Ping servers and blog search engines rose briefly to fill the niche, but Google indexes most popular blogs so often that those blog search engines are no longer much better.

Now, though, we have so much real time content being created that Google and the other engines can’t keep up. Most of this content is on Twitter, but FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg and lots of other services are adding to it, too. The result - more and more people are doing searches on Twitter Search in addition to Google. For me, someone who’s obsessed with news and stuff that’s happening right now, Twitter search is about 25% of my total Internet searches. The ratio keeps going up over time.

That’s where Topsy comes in. It’s not strictly speaking a real time search engine like Scoopler, which we wrote about earlier this month. Topsy is just a search engine. That has a fundamentally new way of finding good results: Twitter users.

The 30 million or so Twitter users are an army of little content-finding machines. Topsy says those users are sending tens of thousands of unique links per day to interesting things around the Internet.

Some of those users have more influence than others. And some links are sent by lots of Twitter users, others just sent once. Those links, combined with the information in the Twitter message itself, is what Topsy uses as the basis of its search engine.

And the results are…amazing.

New stuff in particular percolates up very quickly. A search for Facebook, for example, shows lots of news about the funding that was announced earlier today. And the links are sorted by those that Twitter users are sending around the most, weighted in favor of links sent by more influential Twitter users. You can sort results over all time (going back to September 2008), last month, week, day or hour. For all time, top results for Facebook are the Facebook site and developer site, among others. But in the last hour and day, it’s all about the funding news.

Results show popular links but also the most influential users tweeting about that topic. Click on that user and you’ll see all their tweets about the topic. Here’s the results for TechCrunch and Facebook, for example.

User influence is a hot topic, of course. Topsy isn’t looking at the number of followers. Rather, Influence is gained when others retweet links you’ve sent out. And when you retweet others, you lose a little Influence. So the more people retweet you, the more Influence you gain. So, yes, retweets are the new currency on the web. Told you.

Topsy was founded in 2006 and has raised nearly $15 million to date in venture and debt funding. More information on the funding and founders is on the CrunchBase page for Topsy.

Here’s a video where the Topsy founders give an introduction to the service and how it works:

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Everyone wants more Twitter followers. It’s kind of the name of the game. But if you see some tweets in your stream that proclaim: “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com” — don’t be fooled, it’s a scam. The link takes you to a site that requests your Twitter login and pass. It then sends out this tweet to all your followers — a typical worm.

The reason to watch out for this is not only for the tweets of your friends and the retweets, but the links seem to have originated from the account twittercut — which was suspended. But then the links started up again from the account tweetcut (which has also been suspended). In other words, it looks like the perpetrators are just jumping from account to account to keep this thing going.

As a Twitter Search shows, the worm is spreading quickly. Do not give it your Twitter credentials.

If you do click through to the site, you’ll notice that they didn’t even attempt to create fake pages for the bogus site navigation. There is no “About” page, etc. Here’s the message on the page:

TwitterCut.com is the best place for you to grow your twitter network and gain a ton of followers. We recommend giving it a shot, it’s free and will help you get the followers you need. This system is brand new, so the quicker you get involved the better it will be, fill out the form below and get started right away…

The quicker you get involved! The play on getting more Twitter followers is a smart one — something that wouldn’t necessarily work for a Facebook’s worms of a similar nature. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of these. Again, do not give this site your Twitter info.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors