A TV Guide for the Scheduled Web

Earlier this week, Live Matrix's co-founders Sanjay Reddy and Nova Spivack gave us a brief demo of the service and while looking at the product, the comparison to TV Guide came up a number of times. Given that some of the core team members - including Reddy and the company's vice president of engineering Edgar Fereira - have actually worked for TV Guide in the past, this comparison is only natural. The site itself also plays on this connection, with a grid-like layout that is clearly reminiscent of TV Guide and similar online and print products.

When we first looked at the service ahead of its private beta earlier this year, we described it as "the live web's first programming guide" and as far as we can see, it is still the only service of its kind.

For the most part, Live Matrix compiles its schedule with the help of its own web crawler, but a number of services, including ESPN and eBay also provide the company with direct access to their schedules. In one of the next iterations of the tool, users will also be able to submit their own events.

Reminders

Just giving users a schedule is one thing, but without reminders, most people will likely forget about future events. Because of this, Live Matrix made reminders one of the central features of the service. Not only can you create email reminders on the site itself, but Live Matrix also provides publishers and event hosts with a reminder widget for their own sites. Live Matrix plans to add text message alerts in the future and the team is also thinking about adding push alerts to a Live Matrix mobile app in the future. Soon, Reddy and Spivack told us, you will also be able to check in at the time you are attending an event.

Filling a Niche

There can be little doubt that Live Matrix fills a need that, due to the proliferation of live video and other scheduled events on the Web, could turn out to be a very lucrative market for the company. In the long run, the team also hopes to create a kind of Nielsen rating for live events and offer companies predictive analytics for scheduled events so that live video producers, for example, can plan their bandwidth capacity accordingly.

For users, Live Matrix succeeds in making previously hard to find events easily discoverable. For event hosts, this new service offers a new marketing avenue and a chance to drive more traffic to their sites. Thanks to the reminder widget, which will probably become quite popular among news organizations and bloggers, you will surely see a lot more of Live Matrix in the future - even if you don't regularly go to the site itself.

Live Matrix Demo from Doug Freeman on Vimeo.

But sometimes there's an issue with displaying the raw, unfiltered tweets in this way: they can be disruptive. All it takes is one Twitter user trying to be funny - or, worse, a troll saying something rude - to take the discussion off course. Now there's a new solution to deal with this problem: Paratweet.

Using Paratweet

After signing up for a Paratweet account, you create a new event, set up some keywords or hashtags to monitor, and you can even enter an onscreen question for the audience to respond to, if desired.

As the tweets begin to stream in, you simply approve or reject them by clicking the green plus sign or red X as necessary. If you don't want to manually moderate tweets, you can choose to auto approve them instead. After you have a few tweets approved, you hit the button marked "Live Display Control" to start streaming the approved tweets to the "Live Display Application."

This "Live Display Application" is an Adobe AIR app designed just for Paratweet and it's meant to be run on the computer connected to the projector, LCD, or CCTV. Also, because you log in to the AIR app with your Paratweet account to pull the relevant tweets, you don't have to perform the moderation on the same PC as the one being used for display, although you certainly could.

Why Paratweet?

Paratweet isn't the first application to deliver Twitter moderation functionality - Twubs, for example, also offers a live events app with this capability. However, Paratweet offers a couple of extra features which gives it an edge.

For one, it includes a profanity filter which you can turn on or off as desired - an item that was definitely on the wish list of pastors who wanted to use Twitter during their sermons or other church events, like youth group meetings. It also links the moderation app and display app via a secret code for extra security in order to make sure no one but those approved to do so can moderate the tweets. The code is unique to each event.

Unlike using search.twitter.com, Paratweet lets you track multiple search terms or hashtags at once. As the tweets come in, you can optionally play or pause the stream - helpful if the speaker wants to respond to something on the screen without the distraction of more tweets streaming by.

Unfortunately, all this Twitter goodness doesn't come cheap. Paratweet offers two pricing plans: $299 for 6 months and one event (which you can use over and over) or $599 for 6 months and 3 separate events. The $599 plan also includes the onscreen question feature, something unfortunately not found in the less expensive plan. Alternately, you can save by purchasing a yearly license for $999.

To try Paratweet for yourself, you can sign up here.