“We know there’s already been a lot of buzz around Twitter mash ups. However, we think our dynamic tag-based approach might be of interest.

What is Twitscoop?

- A twitter browser: it helps you stumble upon discussions on twitter – by hovering your mouse over keywords, you can very easily see what the twittersphere is buzzing about right now;
- A meme tracker: by picturing the twittersphere via a tag cloud, it allows you to detect hot trends and breaking news very quickly;
- A marketing tool: you can search for keywords, and track their activity on twitter thanks to live graphs – useful to track a buzz marketing campaign on a product for instance;
- A tool for journalists and bloggers: it helps detect breaking news (think “earthquake”), follow events and conferences (think live microblogging), and our exportable graphs and tag cloud can be used as supporting material for a blog post.

Examples

- Breaking News: This how the tag cloud looked when Yves Saint Laurent died: here
- Breaking News: Softbank to offer iphones in Japan: here.

How does it work ?

Our crawler fetches hundreds of tags per minute, keeps the ones in english, and filters the spam. We then apply an algorithm inspired by Financial Markets Buy & Sell systems to detect hot trends. Twitscoop relies on 2 linux based-servers (one for the crawl / algorithm, one for serving pages), and was built with Ruby on Rails.

Why is it better than competition ?

Twitscoop is much more than a search engine or link tracker. In fact, we think that a twitter search engine is limited in its potential uses (main use is ego search to compensate for twitter’s deficiencies in terms of @replies tracking). Twitscoop can do this of course, but it fits the instantaneous nature of twitter in a much better way. It can provide useful analytics on trends for specific keywords, and unlike pure search engines, twitscoop can be used as a twitter browser (a “serendipity facilitator”).

Who built it ?

Twitscoop was built by Lollicode, a self-funded parisian startup of 4 entrepreneurs cumulating more than 20 years of experience in telecoms, financial markets and internet technologies. Lollicode is currently working on 3 different projects for retail and corporate clients.”

Final word: not the prettiest front page, but functional.

Twitscoop Tracks What’s Hot on Twitter is a post from: The Inquisitr