Back in June we previewed a new product by social media search engine Kosmix called TweetBeat. Essentially, it’s a way to follow news being discussed on Twitter in realtime. Today during our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Kosmix is officially releasing the product.
Kosmix calls TweetBeat “the end of hashtags”. Because they scan all tweets being sent out for all kinds of semantic data, you no longer have to explicitly tag things with hashtag, is their stance. For example, over the past few days there have been almost 64,000 tweets about Disrupt from over 11,000 people — but only a small percentage have used the “#tcdisrupt” tag. TweetBeat found the tweets anyway.
TweetBeat scans over 90 million tweets a day to find the most interesting topics, but only shows you the best tweets about those topics. They do this by identifying the influencers for any given topic. And again, they scan the tweets themselves for semantic data. They also look at signals such as how often a tweet was retweeted or replied to.
With TweetBeat you can ”follow live in real time the most interesting things are saying about any realtime event,” the company says. But you can also pause things and replay tweets from a specific moment in time. There’s a nice slider tool to track when a topic was heating up. And if you connect your Twitter account (which you don’t have to), you can easily retweet or reply to anything you see on the service.
Here’s the TweetBeat page for TechCrunch Disrupt. And check out the leaderboard.
Kosmix is a guide to the Web. The site (www.kosmix.com) lets users explore the Web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics. Kosmix’s categorization engine organizes the Internet into magazine-style topic pages, enabling people to navigate the Web even if they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Kosmix was founded in 2005 by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman. Harinarayan and Rajaraman...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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