It was a very unusual networking event because we had a 3-minute pitch for the geeks to get an idea on what we are doing and then talk to each of them for 9 minutes. If you are thinking of speed dating you are right. That was exactly how it was. In our pitch we decided to talk on why building the social graph is important. Main takeaways:

• We are talking about conversations for more than 10 years now but all that we have is millions of unrelated messages, with no context that you can not do anything interesting with them.
• Context Voice brings order to all the chaos by creating a search-able index of platform agnostic conversations that you can track in real time.
• This is very important because we help people find and interact with their tribe.
• You can do all sort of amazing stuff on top of all the data we are giving you.

Robert also did a nice live interview with us that we embedded bellow:

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• Commercial use for the free version
  Our thinking was that if people make money out of the API it would be nice to get a share of that. What we didn’t take into consideration was that you can still start a commercial project and not make any money for some time.  Not to mention that many of the applications that people thought of building with the API were commercial apps. So from now on you can use the free version for all your business projects too.
• Number of API calls
  We still have the 5000 calls/day limit. However if you are working on a cool project and need more than 5000 calls give us an email/ reach us on Twitter etc, tell us about it and we would be more than happy to increase that limit to help your app grow.

Have fun and enjoy the summer!

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Tweetvisor is one of the users of ContextVoice API. Today we asked Nelu, the developer of Tweetvisor, a few questions about his product, Context Voice and live in general.

Who are you and what do you do for a living?

I am Nelu Lazar, a Romanian living in the US. During regular business hours I am an Electrical Project Engineer, leading remotely an off-shore Romanian team in Brasov to design high performance electronic equipment for large off-highway trucks, locomotives, power generators. Evenings and nights I am a dad of two, a husband, an entrepreneur, a web developer and a social media and networking enthusiast. Traveler, soccer player, musician, biker and more, the rest of the time.

What is Tweetvisor?

Tweetvisor slightly deviated from its original purpose, shaping now more as a web-based interface that extends Twitter’s meaning. It basically is a fully-featured Ajax-powered Twitter client running in The Cloud. Some of its features:

• Manage multiple accounts (personal, corporate etc.)
• Multi-column templates, with auto-refresh (replies, DMs, hot-topic and various timelines)
• Tabbed browsing (each user, trend, hashtag, stock ticker etc. has its own tab)
• Display conversation threads (to better understand friends’ tweets)
• Groups and user Tags (for categorizing your friends)
• Save favorite search topics
• Complex searches, geolocation search, with option to save search query for later use
• Youtube, Vimeo and Metacafe inline thumbs
• TwitPic and Pikchur inline photo previews
• Picture uploads via TwitPic
• Stock tickers links
• Hashtag links
• Mouseover replies opens “in reply to” tweet
• Live Twitter trends list
• Manage followers
• Favorite tweets list
• Inline video replies

How did you find about ContextVoice?

Even though I live far away from my country, I am watching very closely everything that is happening in Romanian online space. I’ve started light personal web projects since late ’90s, when “Transylvania” University’s leda.unitbv.ro and zzn.com hosting service were some accessible tools to play with HTML, but I am more involved in Romanian networking since 2006 when blogs and other social web tools began to be embraced in Romania as well. So this way I’ve initially heard about uberVU and its ascendant path to becoming a very good tool that builds the conversational graph around web comments, reactions and mentions world wide. Recently there was a discussion opened with uberVU and ContextVoice’s founder Vladimir Oane about integrating their API into Tweetvisor’s tweets timelines and the feed reader.

What do you use the ContextVoice API for?

Tweetvisor - Context Voice integration

Thousands of links are being shared every day on Twitter. There is definitely a lot of noise out there, but you’d still like to find out the latest good news and articles, or what people are talking about your brand, company or your blog articles. As a solution to this trend, Tweetvisor is now displaying world wide reactions to any URL shared on Twitter and listed with the web-based application, via newly launched ContextVoice service. Tweetvisor’s integrated Feed Reader also displays ContextVoice’s world wide reactions for every blog posts.

What do you find most exciting about ContextVoice?

ContextVoice makes a very easy task out of tracking comments and reactions for any article URL across the Internet. You can see how your links or keywords are shared, propagated and commented on many web platforms. ContextVoice API is a good tool for personal research, but it is an even powerful tool for brands, companies and organizations that really needs to keep a close eye on what their customers have to say about their business activity or, say, newly launched products.

Is there something we must do to make you happier?

I’ve just implemented the API, and ContextVoice is doing a very good job on Tweetvisor, the integration performs smoothly. There will be a monitoring timeframe for the next few weeks, to observe how Twitter users are following world wide conversations for URLs shared on every tweets. For the near future I am opened to increasing implementation’s capabilities by adding more features that will help people track web reactions they’re interested in.

Final words?

I am very happy ContextVoice and Tweetvisor managed to cooperate very well to accomplish this integration. We both hope people will find these tools helpful for their daily-basis tweeting needs.

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Last week was totally hectic. We launched a new website, a new product and a new version of the API.  So we would like to thank all the people who helped us to get things out the door:

Brohouse for the amazing logo

We needed a new logo for Context Voice and we needed it fast. So Brohouse was there to help us create a logo in almost no-time. You can read the whole story on their blog. Thanks again guys!

Steve Ho for helping us solve some crazy database issues

A month ago we ran into some very weird problems with our databases. Steve was calm enough to help us methodically test all the possible causes and help us identify the problem(s) and solve them. Thank you Steve! We owe you one!

All the great people who wrote about our launch

I am thinking of:

• FocusIT for letting our fellow Romanian hackers know about the change
• OpenCoffee Bucharest for hosting the first ContextVoice presentation
• Stefano Bernardi for breaking the news before everyone else on thestartup.eu
• Dana Oshiro for her great article and interview in ReadWriteWeb
• Mircea Goia for the great article in TheNextWeb
• Seedcamp for mentioning our launch on their blog and breaking the news to all the European startups.

Thank you ALL!

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It’s going to be a pretty long article, so you can skip to the short version/conclusion here.

Streams

The Web is definitely moving towards a stream-like, conversational structure. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, all of these work as streams. More importantly, to emphasize the trend, feed readers and even Gmail are starting to look like streams/conversations. I find myself spending over 50% of my personal time online in a stream environment and, if you consider Gmail a stream-like experience, probably close to 80% of my work time inside streams.

There are two approaches to streams that, if you look at how we function as human beings in real life, are totally complementary.

Imagine meeting a friend outside a coffee shop en route to a meeting. The friend, with the context around her is an atom in a stream of inputs that demands your attention. You start talking to her about something, the conversation then suddenly focuses on something else. Your phone rings and so you focus your attention on the phone call, which is actually just another atom in the stream. Your meeting partner is going to be late. You then switch your attention to your friend and start talking about something completely different.

This is the way we operate in real life when we try to find information or socialize, yet the Web does not reflect that. Until now.

I’d associate the stream of information all around you with the way Twitter works, while the way we dig deeper into a certain subject / interact with a social object is more like FriendFeed works – or ContextVoice / uberVU for that matter.

Whatever the type of stream you experience, soon enough you realize you cannot consume it all, as it was not conceived for that. Navigation becomes more important that it has been so far with pages, because a stream changes continuously. It’s not just about finding some “relevant” information, like you do on Google, because that may not be relevant anymore in a changing stream. I’d argue that it’s not even just about finding “real time” information, like you do on Twitter search, because that only addresses the time axis. It’s a combination of the two that probably yields the best results.

How we think about streams

We started tracking comments from all over the Web around URLs because we felt a conversation does not stay trapped within a single site or domain and so you should not experience the conversation that way. The conversation flows between blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and social networks but it’s essentially the same conversations.

Pages don’t matter anymore, it’s all about being able to tap into the right stream at the right time and filter it as you like.

What ContextVoice does is find related bits of streams (trackbacks, comments, tweets) from the larger stream, sticks them together and creates a new stream that we keep track of. We think it’s one way of navigating the larger Stream, by sticking together related pieces that are part of the same conversation.

As streams will be the fabric of the Web, being able to tap into streams to extract valuable information is going to be key. Navigating and participating in streams will be part of most web apps and will be used by both people and businesses. Everybody will be using this technology, just like e-mail and RSS. It’s already happening, with buzztracking tools and customer service on Twitter.

We can easily imagine applications tapping into streams to extract events, financial and health information, interests, relationships and a lot of other types of data, processing it and then pushing back to the Stream, to be consumed. This is where ContextVoice comes in providing applications with easily accessible ways of tapping the Stream.

Taking this to the next level, we believe search is probably going to still be the preferred way of finding information in the Stream. But I think of search not as it is today, but mostly as a combination of Tracking and Discovery. You’ll express what you want to know about, not necessarily now, but perpetually, and search system should be smart enough to pick up the appropriate pieces of the Stream, apply filters and deliver the right data to you, as a stream.

This is the approach we’re taking with uberVU. uberVU will be a search and analytics product, where you’ll be able to both search for conversations around URLs and search for keywords. The results returned will be whole conversations, not just posts or tweets containing the keyword. And, of course, you’ll be able to experience searching for a keyword as a stream of conversations updated in close to realtime.

We think this is an important distinction which ties into the role Context will play in the new Web.

The Role of Context

The Stream is made up of atomic pieces that constantly flow, with not much context to go by. Think of your Twitter stream – continuous updates on different subjects, shared links – each update does not have much context except the author and the time of posting.

People’s need for context became evident even on Twitter. That’s why we have @, RT or #. These symbols are trying to bring in a piece of context and encapsulate it in the atomic bit of information. So context is needed if we are to make sense of what information in the Stream means and where our attention should lie.

A more subtle implication of this fact is that context should be able to be incapsulated in the information itself and easily travel with the information wherever it goes. Of course, context changes over time and a piece of information can be looked at from within different contexts.

This is exactly why we built ContextVoice as a different product than uberVU.

Firstly, ContextVoice gets CONTEXT around stories from all over the Web. Instead of getting simple bits of information with no context around them, we get comments from all over the Web that are about the same story. This makes for some interesting information. You can see actual comments but also how they’re related to each other (RT, threads, comments to trackbacks), how they happened on the timeline, how fast the conversation has accelerated and decelerated, etc.

Secondly, as I said before, CONTEXT should be able to travel with the data. This can prove really tricky, as some conversations are made up of over 10,000 bits of information. In order to solve this problem, ContextVoice can return all the CONTEXT around a story in a single API call. We can’t encapsulate it in the data, as it’s not practical, but we have set it free and easily accessible.

Thirdly, we are not the only ones that will need this data. A lot of companies will use it, as we move more and more towards a more streamy Web. What we’re doing with uberVU is a single use case in a sea of possibilities.

Context can be used for many things. More context is usually better, but after a certain limit, I think context will only be useful in realtime search. People won’t be able to process it, but we’ll need it if we want to get relevant search results in realtime. As uberVU will mostly be a search product, we’re trying to get as much context around stories as we can, there no such thing as too much.

In Short

The Web is turning into a realtime Stream. We won’t be able to digest it all, so navigation will be increasingly important. One way to navigate the Stream will be through Search, but smart realtime search needs a lot of Context around the atomic bits of information if we are to find the truly relevant information we need from this everflowing, noisy Stream.

We built ContextVoice in order to get Context around stories from all over the Web. We get comments, mentions, reactions, tweets and other things, some of them in close to real time. ContextVoice is an API because of two reasons:

1. Context should be able to travel with the data. As we can’t encapsulate this much context within the data itself, providing it as an API call seems to be the easiest way.

2. As the Stream becomes the very fabric of the Web, being able to tap it will probably become like RSS or e-mail. Everyone will need this technology as part of their apps or businesses.

uberVU, the product that uses ContextVoice will try to tackle one of the problems of navigating this Stream – what you’d call Search and I’d call Track/Discovery. Finding fully contextual conversations (streams) to participate in, not just atomic bits that contain keywords.

Back to top

It’s been a long article, but if you’ve come this far, I encourage you to hang in there for a couple more seconds and share your thoughts.

New calls and parameters

You probably noticed it takes a long time to get a conversation that has many thousand reactions. We did a few things to improve this issue:

1. We know have 2 endpoints: one for reactions (where you just get the comments for an URL) and one for a resource (that you can use to get meta-data about a URL-based conversation). So for things like title, content or generator of a URL you know have a new endpoint called at http://api.contextvoice.com/1.1/resources
2. We introduce paginated responses – if you read the documentation you will see two parameters: page and perpage that will help you achieve this. You no longer have to download megabytes for one response
3. We automatically track top-blogs. And now we update them faster.
4. You can now order the reactions asc/desc using the ‘created_at‘ field

New platforms

We now introduce 4 new platforms where we gather comments/reactions from: StumbleUpon, Delicious, Mixx and NewYorkTimes. What this means is than from now on we also get comments from NewYorkTimes website and for all the links in our index we get comments from StumbleUpon, Delicious, Mixx.

Simple Update Protocol

We now support Simple Update Protocol or simply SUP. SUP is a project developed and maintained by the good folks at FriendFeed. Context Voice SUP is a a simple and compact “ping feed” that alerts your web app when a conversation has been updated. This reduces update latency and improves efficiency by eliminating the need for frequent polling. Not so many calls means less bandwidth and for paying customers money savings.

Context Voice SUP is available at http://api.contextvoice.com/sup.json/?apikey=yourapikey

Non-authenticated calls

You can now make non-authenticated calls to get reactions for a given URL. So if you only need to get comments for a given URL use http://externalapi.contextvoice.com/1.1/reactions/?url=http://www.yoururl.com

You are restricted to 500 anonymous call per day per IP. This way of using Context Voice API is perfect for plugins, widgets or any type of app that’s distributed on users machines rather than running from one server with one IP address.

That’s about it… Let us know what you think. We welcome any feedback.

Anything else? We also have a new page with wrappers: a Ruby one and a PHP one. Many thanks to the wonderful people who developed them.

PS 1: “What about search?” you may ask. We know… we know. It’s coming but we need a little bit more time to polish and document it. Bare with us and you will not be dissapointed.

PS 2: version 1.0 is still supported by the way. You can even use the new platforms with it. But we recommend you switch to the new version asap.

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Later edit: Finished. Back on track!

Conversations are becoming the fabric of the social web. Millions of people are commenting everywhere about everything. With the rise of services like Twitter, this is happening faster and faster, in close to real time.

Tapping into these conversations and communities, although difficult technically, is not something new. There are dozens of companies out there offering buzztracking services for marketing, PR and advertising professionals based on these online conversations.

However, as social media has become mainstream and social business software has become more widespread, some interesting changes have started to happen.

1. First of all, social media tracking is becoming a commodity. There are a lot of free tools out there that are doing a good job at tracking all of this. Also, a lot of people are starting to use these tools, even outside of professional circles. People track their names, their friends, their favorite bands or companies on Twitter and on blogs. They’ve started to take social media for granted.
2. Secondly, as social business software proliferates, more people at lower levels of the organization are starting to make the use of social media central to their work. They’re talking to people inside and outside of the organization and need tools to track and manage all those conversations.
3. Thirdly, as Fred Wilson states, a new layer of social media is emerging. This new layer works on top of existing platforms (social networks, blog comments, Twitter) to provide valuable data, insights and analytics. As this new layer takes shape, the underlying data it’s based on should become easier to track in real time, making data gathering a commodity.

Right now every company that wants to tap into social media conversations either to create a new product or to use that data internally has to develop crawling software and hardware infrastructure that’s complicated to build and very costly to run. Crawling is not their core business, yet they have to do it. This is, of course, highly inefficient, like having every company building and providing its own internet connection or ERP software.

This is where ContextVoice comes in. We feel that social media conversations will become as widespread as e-mail, even inside businesses. Using social media daily in your work and personal life will take an even more central role. With thousands of conversations happening this second, crawling, analyzing, filtering and making sense of the data will not be easy, but it will be essential.

The ContextVoice API delivers close to real time conversations as a service, because crawling and filtering are just a necessary evil if they’re not the core business. We think social media conversations are a commodity that companies and individuals should be able to tap into cheaply and effectively and that’s our purpose.

Our presentation is below:

The main ideas/takeaways from our talk:

• We add another layer to the social stack. After the conversational graph (Facebook) or message graph (Twitter) we want to offer a conversational graph.
• It’s a service that you can use through an easy to use API
• Main features of the API are search, filtering, SUP support and close to real time URL tracking
• You should use our API because you save time and money
• You can do tons of stuff on top of it: from blogging tools to financial applications or meme websites.

Few pictures from the event:

Context Voice Logo

We are happy to announce that, as of today, the uberVU API will be called ContextVoice and will live at ContextVoice.com.

For now, apart from the name change, there are no other changes that have been introduced. So you might ask then, why do it?

The reasons are many.

First of all, the uberVU API seems to have taken on a life of its own. Lots of people want to use it for things we never would have imagined. When we tell people what we do, the first question the ask is usually “Do you have an API?”.

Because people want to use it to do very different things than we have originally thought, we’ll have to add things in the API that have no relation the uberVU as a product. What uberVU does right now will, in the future, only be a small part of what ContextVoice will offer. That’s one of the reasons why we felt the API needed to be a product on its own.

Secondly, while uberVU is still in the Private Beta works for the time being, the API is now public and people are willing to pay for it and use it commercially. This subtle difference between where the product and the API is in terms of development and reliability was not apparent from the uberVU site. So it confused a lot of people that wanted to find out about the API and use it within their apps.

For now, you’ll see no change in the API calls made if you’re already using the uberVU API. If you’re thinking of starting to use it, however, we suggest going to the website and start using ContextVoice.

We’ll announce changes made to the API as they happen, making sure it’s not a hassle for you to implement those changes, should that be the case.

As, always, we’re very interested in knowing what you think about this. Shoot your thoughts in the comments, on FriendFeed or Twitter.