Today is guest day. As always, we invite you to send in your ideas for a post. Ideally, we would like the post to be topical. And both of today’s entries are right on the mark. First up is an interview, via email, with Maria Grineva. She is one of the minds behind the excellent web service Twitter Tim.es, which looks at links your friends are tweeting and turns them into a virtual newspaper.
-Steve
First, tell us about yourself.
I am a computer scientist currently working at ETH Zurich, originally I am from Moscow, Russia.
A year ago, we started a company – Semantic Dimension, Inc. together with my friends: two in Moscow, two (me and Max Grinev) here in Zurich and one (Kirill Soshalsky) is located in San Francisco. Twittertim.es is one of our products. Also, we have developed semantic text processing technology that automatically uses knowledge from Wikipedia to “understand” texts.
What is the Twitter Times?
TwitterTim.es is a personalized newspaper built from your Twitter account. In TwitterTim.es you get a concise view of what is being discussed by your friends on Twitter — what is most important right now. The TwitterTim.es newspaper is always up-to-date and is being updated every two hours. What is also important is that we collect not only tweets of your friends but also tweets from the second circle of your friends (friends of friends), so you can still get relevant news but do not stick within your (immediate) community.
How did the idea come about?
We all used Twitter, and were very excited about it. I realized that I get news mostly from reading Twitter. And it is easy to manage your news stream simply by following more interesting people. Max Grinev first had this idea of representing a Twitter stream as a newspaper. It was funny to merge the two things together: Twitter is so new, while newspapers are something traditional. We quickly created the first prototype and I understood that the tool is really useful because I use it and my friends did. When you follow more than 100-200 people you often miss interesting links, and TwitterTim.es helps you to catch up.
What was the biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge is to crystallize the value from Twitter and other social media for traditional businesses. We try to find out how social media can transform businesses into some more effective forms. Being computer scientists, we are developing methods and tools for businesses to find their customers in social media, monitoring opinions spread about a brand, gathering statistics related to the business and more.
Do you see the Twitter Times becoming a business? How will you make money?
We have not tried yet neither putting ads into newspapers, nor charging some fee for the service, and I am not enthusiastic about these ways (of bringing in revenue).
On the other hand, as a result of building TwitterTim.es, we have built a scalable infrastructure for collecting tweets and we can gather a lot of useful statistics. As I said, we are working on new methods and tools to help businesses sieze people’s attention via social media.
Currently we are in talks with a big online retailer. We are experimenting to enrich their traditional online store with relevant content from social media to make the users’ online shopping experience closer to what they get when using Twitter or Facebook. While clicking on a product in the online store, the user would be able to get reviews from blogs, know relevant products, see who of their friends also bought the product and maybe get useful and relevant tutorials from YouTube.
Are you considering expanding to including feeds from other social networks?
Yes, we are thinking about adding Facebook.
What are your benchmarks for success?
At this point, we have built a useful tool. A lot of people like it and use. We are very excited about it and it was an important experience. But our goal is also to establish a stable business model for our company.
What is your long-term goal for Twitter Times?
The Web is changing so fast, so it is difficult to set some very long-term goals.
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The Twitter Times has had a bookmark on the Chrome browser I have on the netbook. It's a tad repetitive at times, but it does yield an interesting article or two on a regular basis.
thank god i am a computer hermit.
If you get into music production will you have the Twitter Twins?
The Web hasn't scratched it's nose in years. Making it wireless only adds a node of DISTRIBUTION.
The one thing that has truly made an impact on the industry in putting a camera in a cellphone. Everything after that is another tweak.
I didn't need software to understand this gem from Saddam Hussein's entry just after the fact…
“w00t! He's dead!”
Somebody scooped me, dang them
computer hermit?haha ,me too