Vincent Guilbeau wrote to The Inquisitr to tell us about his new service Twitscoop. We don’t often get such thorough, well written pitches, so here’s the pitch in full:
“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.
