Discover what has really been tweeted during the Twestival !

Here is a bunch of graphs tracing what has been tweeted during the Inauguration day, on January 20th.

But yesterday I just wondered…Who among the twitterers had been the most prolific about #LeWeb ? Who for example tweeted the most about #Coelho during these days ? Which startup was the hottest on the Twittosphere ?

Well, all of these questions can be answered quite easily : here is a bunch of graphs I’ve plotted that will give you some clues… Go ahead and take a look at it !

Go through the below presentation and find out how the tool Tweetag can be used to monitor the topic of your choice.

Twitter is platform where more than 3 million people post short messages about what they are doing or thinking.
It’s exactly like your status on facebook except that here most of them are totally public and anyone can follow your updates.
This frenzy ecosystem can be visualized live on the brillant TwitterVision.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could tell what all these people are most talking about?

To do so, you can use the impressive Twitscoop. It analyzes words frequencies and gives you the hottest trends live. That’s cool.

But what if you want to know what all these people on twitter have to say about, let’s say, Obama?
Twitscoop is not gonna be of any help here.

Instead, you can do a search on search.twitter.com. A search for Obama will bring you all the tweets talking about Obama in real-time.
That’s cool!
But you’re probably not going to read all the tweets, there are too many!

Let’s go back to my first question: “What people have to say about Obama?”.
Reading the first 10 tweets of the result list will not give you any clue to answer that question.
Indeed, the 10 last persons who published a thought about Obama may not represent the topics that have been discussed lately!

That’s exactly where Tweetag stands.
Instead
of having to read everything to get a picture of a conversation,
Tweetag applies Commentag technologies to allow you to easily catch up
any discussion about a topic of interest.

Try it out by yourself!

You may also want to read the review of Techcrunch about Tweetag.

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Btw, thank you guys @slideshare for having featured this presentation on your homepage :-)The next London Bloggers Meetup will be held on the 29th July at 7.30pmFor a more extensive review of this London Bloggers meetup, check this post.

First there is that funny quote about French people saying that because of our French culture we feel like we have to release fully polished products (and therefore we wait too much). 

About the concept of commentag he highlighted the fact that our real contribution (ie. our killer feature) was our concept of “Nested Tags”. The fact that when you click on one tag, you get directly the other related tags allowing you to narrow down your selection. This is our real innovation and we should more communicate about that.

Concerning my slides, he said that we should more highlight the market.The number of potential users, converted users.How many users will we be able to reach?That’s the very question. It is first all about how to grab the market, then in second how to turn this market of users into a revenue model.

Funny enough, this is almost contradictory with what we are used to in Europe. We just met Patrick Crasson, responsible of the Startup Essentials program of SUN in Belgium. His very first question was “What is your business model?”. “How will you make money” comes here first and not “how will you gain users”. So in Europe, you first have to focus on your revenues, then on the user experience. While VC in the States would allow you to first focus on the user experience (as long as there is a real market).

Both approaches can be good or bad depending on the business. The very question is in which game should we play? Should we see big and focus on user experience, or should we play safe and focus on a smaller market but on which we will be able to make money quite quickly?

Talking about the future applications of commentag he said “it’s not about a piece of software that could be applied to many different situations. It is all about a distribution channel”.  “If you start targeting public content like comments, then you can’t apply your product to manage emails or contacts. Because the distribution is not the same. The former is public whereas the latter is private.
However, you could apply it to different type of public content.So the idea here is to focus on developping a distribution on which a piece of software will be applied. Not the contrary.” 

This is a very interesting thought.Because at a first glance we would all think in terms of software (or product) and in its capabilities.At best, we will think in terms of market pain and try to address the issue (what we did), but never we would have thought in terms of distribution.So it is very important to focus on one distribution and then leverage it.

About the current downturn he said that it only gonna hurt companies selling advertises in the range $4 to 20$ cpm (cost per mille). ie. all companis playnig the role of useless intermediaries.However, in the funding stage the situation will probably be more difficult as investors would invest in less projects (which is already the case in Silicon Valley, see doom and gloom hits Silicon Valley).

Thanks again Reshma and Scott. Your advises are like always very helpful and much appreciated.

There, we were able to meet really interesting people, had edifying talks and debated about really hot topics such as WP & video, collective translation, OpenID, Social Nets, and even… our big brother Semantic Web !

Not only almost every attendee was able to give us his critics about Commentag’s concept and features, but we also discovered more about their own work, projects or blogs :

• Seesmic
• Travailleurs du Web
• Gobz
• L’Observatoire des Medias
• Agendeo
• Cinod
• Lense
• …

Thank you all for your remarks ! Looking forward to see you soon in a Brussels WordCamp… ^^

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