Three Keywords - Three Languages

In its current state, Monitter is restricted to always displaying three keyword searches in three separate columns. Once you change the keywords, Monitter will display the last tweet with those keywords in it and then constantly update the search. In our tests, it never took more than 30 seconds before Monitter picked up on a new tweet.

One of the really cool features of Monitter is that you can filer tweets by language. Right now, those languages are English, Spanish, and German. Overall, those filters seemed to work very well. This does, however, also mean that you won't see tweet in other languages, which is a bit of a limitation, but will probably only bother very few users.

As the folks over at Web Worker Daily point out, Monitter also works great in a site specific browser like Fluid on the Mac or Bubbles on the PC.

Widget

The Monitter team has also built an embeddable widget so that you can display these searches on your own site. Because of how wide the widget has to be, though, this approach might not be really useful for a lot of people.

Competition

There are, of course, various Twitter search engines available already. Summize, which was bought by Twitter and is now the standard Twitter search engine, is great way to search for specific keywords and allows you to reply to tweets right from the application. Twitscoop, which we reviewed about a month ago, is also a very capable Twitter search engine and features a very cool, constantly updating tag cloud.

Verdict

In terms of its features, one nice addition to Monitter would be the ability to reply to tweets right out of the application. Even more interesting would be the ability to send tweets right out of the app, which would, of course, make it even more of a TweetDeck for the browser (an inspiration that, by the way, the developer fully acknowledges). Also, it would be nice if you could turn off the language filtering.

Overall, though, Monitter is a cool and well designed way to monitor certain keywords on Twitter. It is not so much useful as a search engine, as it only displays the last tweet that matches your keywords. Its power is in constantly updating these search results, and while its competitors can do this as well, Monitter's ability to track more than one search is often very useful. If you already use TweetDeck, this application might not be too useful for you. However, if you are using Twhirl or any other Twitter client, then you could do a lot worse than giving Monitter a try.

From what we were able to see in the short time the design was up, Twitter is mostly trying to streamline its interface with this new design - we did not spot any new features. The latest tweet a user made has been moved from the profile on the top right to directly underneath the text entry box. The 'reply' and 'favorite' shortcuts have been moved out of the interface and now only show when you hover over a message. The search box has also been moved and the empty space between the updates and the profile information on the right has been removed.

While the new design keeps the general feel of the old Twitter page, the new design is decisively more minimalist and clean. As Twitter is preparing to integrate Summize into its site, chances are that if they want to integrate Summize's real-time updates, they would also have to redesign their front-end to be able to display those updates.

Interestingly, the redesign looks exactly like the sketch Twitter used in its post about the Summize acquisition. Judging from this, the integration with Summize might already be quite far along.

Summize will now power search.twitter.com and its popular API will be folded into the Twitter API. All five Summize employees will move to San Francisco and work for Twitter. That's great news in the product development department; we should see some really exciting things come out of this deal.

We expect to see some things come out of this deal that can't be foreseen today.

The one thing that remains a mystery is the acquisition price. Twitter hasn't raised a huge amount of money and Summize had almost a million dollars in funds raised itself. What percentage of its coffers did Twitter just spend on all the Summize technology and five employees? It's probable that Summize investors saw their investments in Summize turn into favorable investments in Twitter, rather than a pile of cash. When one startup buys another one, though, one always has to wonder. It's usually a sign of desperation on the part of the acquired company - but that's not likely the case here.

We'll see what they can do together! Here's the Summize blog post about the deal, which is much more interesting than the relatively simple Twitter post about it. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams did an interesting interview about the deal with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington while at FOO Camp. The video was just released today and is worth a watch.

Partner Relationships

Websites wishing to leverage the BOSS APIs will be allowed to can blend in their own ranking input and change the presentation of results. There are no requirements for attribution to Yahoo! and there's no limit on the number of queries that can be performed.

At launch Yahoo! BOSS will see live integrations with at least three other companies. Hakia will integrate their semantic parsing with the Yahoo! index and search, social browser plug-in Me.dium will use the data it's collected to offer a social search tied to the Yahoo! index, and real-time sentiment search engine Summize was included in the BOSS demo - augmenting Yahoo News search results with related Twitter messages.

More extensive customization and integration with large media companies will be performed with assistance from Yahoo! and ad-free access to the APIs will be made available to the Computer Science departments of academic institutions.

Does Anyone Really Care About Niche Vertical Search Engines?

We asked Yahoo! just that, although we believe that alternative search engines can be pretty exciting. None the less, we think it's a valid question.

Senior Director of the Open Search Platform, Bill Michels told us that niche search engines often aren't very good because they have access to a very limited index of content. It's expensive to index the whole web. Likewise, Michels said that there are a substantial number of large organizations that have a huge amount of content but don't have world-class search technology.

In both cases, Yahoo! BOSS is intended to level the playing field and blow the Big 3 wide open. We agree that it's very exciting to imagine thousands of new Yahoo! powered niche search engines proliferating. Could Yahoo! plus the respective strengths and communities of all these new players challenge Google? We think they could.

What's Not Included?

The BOSS APIs are in beta for now, so they may be expanded with time - but for now there are still a few crown jewels in the company's plans that won't be opened up. We asked about Yahoo's indexing of the semantic web and were told that would not be a part of BOSS. We asked about the Inbox 2.0 strategy and the company's plans to rewire for social graph and data portability paradigms. We were told that those were "other programs."

We hope that there's not a fundamental disconnect there that will lead to lost opportunities and a lack of focus. It is clear, though, that BOSS falls well within the company's overall technical strategy of openness. When it comes to web standards, openness and support for the ecosystem of innovation - there may be no other major vendor online as strong as Yahoo! is today. These are times of openness, where some believe that no single vendor's technology and genius alone can match the creativity of an empowered open market of developers. Yahoo! is positioning itself as leader of this movement.

Let's see what they can do with an army of Yahoo! powered search engines. Let the games begin!

Summize is one of the most interesting services on the web today, both for its feature set and its history. Started as an academic research project by Dr. Abdur Chowdhury of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Summize is today headquartered in Virginia. Chowdhury was the AOL employee who posted 650,000 AOL customers' search queries for researchers to analyze in 2006 - kicking off a storm of debate about data privacy that still rages today.

Summize calls itself a tool for "conversation search," and that's a well deserved tagline. The service's automatic translation tool uses Google Language tools to translate non-English Twitter messages into English with a single click. It's access to the Twitter XMPP API enables it to offer on-screen notification of any new search results as they become available. The Summize search API has become the must-have Twitter search tool for all the best 3rd party Twitter clients and services.

The experimental "sentiment analysis" appears to have been the original intention behind the application's development. We wrote here about Summize almost a year and a half ago when it was focused on combining sentiment analysis and heat maps with search results. Summize also had a short lived deal with the Huffington Post, where story tags were accompanied by related search results from Twitter. Model startup GetSatisfaction is using Summize similarly.

Enter any search term and Summize will analyze the emotional nature of recent discussions of that term on Twitter. It's unclear how well developed the sentiment analysis tool really is, Chowdhury has also long worked on spam control and duplicate detection.

Market Context

This is the second case of a micro-service related to Twitter being acquired by another startup. When video conversation startup Seesmic bought leading Twitter client Twhirl in April, it was probably a deal that gave Twhirl's single developer a job more than it was anything else. It was a groundbreaking deal none the less. For Twitter itself to buy an angel funded project like Summize (TechCrunch reports Summize has $750k in the bank) is a radically different deal.

While cynics are concerned that the deal will lead to Twitter breaking Summize (!) we think it will instead lead to Twitter's more rapid iteration of advanced features - something Twitter has needed almost as badly as it's needed increased up time. Core development of Twitter has crawled in recent months as everyone there has appeared to focus on fixing the service itself. As enthusiastic Twitter users, we're excited to see some more features enter the mix.

For now we await official comment from members of either company. Allen Stern has a nice video of a presentation about Summize given by the company, over on CenterNetworks.

TweetDeck is an AIR based application that was first discovered by Louis Gray. The major difference between TweetDeck and other Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, Twitteriffic, and AlertThingy, is that it displays more than one column of information at a time. In TweetDeck, you can define columns for your replies, numerous searches in Summize, as well as groups. You can define up to 10 different columns.

The developers seem keenly aware of Twitter's problems and provide you with a status message at the bottom right of the client. We have seen it alternate between "Pretty much okay" and "Rate limit exceeded'" today. There is also an indication for when the last tweets were received in the bottom left corner of the application.

Columns

The column display can be rearranged according to taste - only the "All Tweets" column is fixed on the left side. Having all these columns open at the same time obviously means that TweetDeck occupies a lot more screen estate than other Twitter clients - however, the amount of information displayed is far greater as well. For some, this is a trade-off worth making, while it might be a deal-breaker for others.

Groups

The groups function is very useful, especially for people who follow a lot of people, but still want to be able to quickly see what their closest friends (or competitors) are saying. Usually, these messages are easily drowned out in the mass of tweets that come in at any given time.

Once a group is created, you can make changes to it by clicking on its name.

Right now, when you create a group, TweetDeck doesn't display a list of all your friends right away. As TweetDeck becomes aware of more of your friends over time, this problem disappears as TweetDeck's internal database picks up on your friends, but this might be quite confusing and frustrating for first time users.

Preferences

One area where TweetDeck could use some more work is in its preferences - right now, there pretty much are none. You can't change the speed by which it checks for new tweets, there are no themes to chose from (why, by the way, do all AIR apps have to be so dark?), and there is no way to change the size of the fonts.

Verdict

TweetDeck is probably not for everyone, but especially with Twitter's track function still being offline for now, the ability to have a persistent Summize search right in the client is a great feature just by itself. Once the group function works a little bit better, I would venture to guess that a lot more people will start using it. But even in its current state, it is definitely worth a closer look.

Most strikingly, we found that a whopping 5% of all Twitter (in terms of tweets) is powered by the top 100 active accounts. Those 100 users post updates 200-3000 times a day, which might even impress uber-Twitter users like Robert Scoble or Jason Calacanis.

What we saw was that the top Twitter users are not always people, but rather, they're sources using Twitter as a feed publishing platform. For example, the most active user we saw was an account called "lejddfr," which does "push journalism" (sending out frequent links to new stories) for French news service Le Journal du Dimanche. lejddfr has just 315 followers, is following no one, and has made over 101,000 tweets. Another example we saw is "GSSP," which tweets links to stories on the news web site NewzOf.com. Our favorite high volume Twitter user, though is "chandraxray," a space station that tweets its location up to 350 times per day.

To get a feel for the distribution of tweeting activity across the Twitter universe, we sorted users by the number of tweets per day and graphed that vs. the total traffic. 66% of the users only tweet once per day.

But that still doesn't answer the question of what people are talking about. So we started analyzing tweets and came up with a list of the top five words people send. Apparently, the first thing anyone sends out on Twitter is a "test" message.

1. test
2. lol
3. working
4. :)
5. sleeping

Unfortunately, while we can guess from that list that Twitter users tend to be sleepy workaholics who are generally happy, we still can't tell much about what they're really talking about on the service. So we next applied some fancy topic extraction and started calculating trends over our week's worth of data.

What we found is that there are three main types of conversations going on. First, there are status updates of every day occurrences such as, "getting coffee," "check out this post on X," "going to sleep," or other mundane life things. Second, there are short term memes where many people talk about some event before, during, or after it. These conversations are usually short lived -- ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. For example a TV show like "Lost" will have some buzz, before, during, and for a short time after the show airs, but will drop out of the stream very quickly. We saw that happen with "LSD" when the drug's creator Albert Hoffman died last week. The final type of discussion we see on Twitter, are long term memes. These are topics of interest that people talk about for days, weeks, or even months. Politics or new video games are great examples of these longer term discussions happening on the platform.

Below we selected a subset of the automatic trends found for the week to illustrate this phenomenon. Each column from left to right shows the days of the week. Topics on the top of each stack represent shorter lived memes, while topics lower on the chart represent items of longer term interest.

You can click on the links below to explore the memes on those days:

Sunday, April 27: Obama, GTA IV, Mario Kart Wii, Coachella, Facebook, NFL, BBQ, Ubuntu, Spurs
Monday, April 28: Obama, GTA IV, Mario Kart Wii, Coachella, Rev Wright, iMacs, Facebook, Social Brew
Tuesday, April 29: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, Rev Wright, Ben Jerry, Celtics, Lakers, Deal or No Deal
Wednesday, April 30: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, American Idol, LSD, iGoogle, Violet Hill, Neil Diamond, Spurs
Thursday, May 1: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, RSS Awareness Day, Diggnation, Baskin Robbins
Friday, May 2: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, DC Madam, Hawks, BSG, Lost
Saturday, May 3: Obama, GTA IV, Iron Man, Kentucky Derby, Free Comic Book Day, Maker Faire, YouTube, Boris

Conclusion

While technology, politics, and geekery (sci-fi movies and video games) tend to dominate the long term memes, people are discussing all sorts of things on Twitter -- from sports to pop culture to cooking. Could that indicate that the site it starting to have some mainstream appeal? Or maybe just that even us tech geeks occasionally find time to talk about things other than technology? Either way, the way memes flow on Twitter is an interesting topic and one that we had fun looking at.

Special thanks to Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, co-founder of Summize, a conversational search engine. Dr. Chowdhury did all of the data mining and analysis for the this post, as well collaborated on the text and created the charts.