Now Discover Twitter Conversations by Topics or #Hashtags

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Conweets

If you’re reading this blog post, we’ve already added our new feature live! ‘Discover by Topic‘ is the new way to discover conversations based on a topic, better known as a #hashtag in the world of twitter.

‘Discover by Topic’ brings a new way to extract meaningful conversations out of Twitter about topics that you care about. Gone are the days of searching for tags on twitter and tirelessly scanning through a swarm of tweets to find conversations. With this new feature, all we need from you is the topic you are interested in. We do the rest. Quickly scanning through a stream of tweets and figuring out which people are involved in conversations, we present to you a list of possible conversations between people, related to that topic.

From Conweets’ initial stages, we’ve always striven to make a distinction between ‘looking for tweets’ and ‘looking for exchanges of tweets’. Now, with Hash Track, in addition to our existing ‘discover conversations by people’ feature, we’ve made the tiring process of maneuvering through high volumes of tweet traffic to finding the right conversation about a happening topic, easier.

Discovering ongoing conversations and debates about your favorite sports team, exploring discussions about a product, or simply checking out what people have to say in relation to worldwide trends, ‘Discover by Topic’ can be an all-purpose targeted topic based twitter conversation finder.

In memory of Aaron Swartz: Closer to us than we thought

Posted on January 20, 2013 by Conweets

He drove the online world forward. He played a major role in defining the way information flows on the internet. His dedication to issues concerning the internet, amongst many others, will be solely missed. This blog post is in memory of Aaron Swartz (1986-2013). Without getting into the messy controversy that surrounds this case of apparent suicide, we thought we’d just remember Mr. Swartz for his brilliant and creative work.

It wasn’t just his skills as a programmer, but rather the manner in which he used them to make knowledge more accessible to the people that defined his personality. Being the co founder of the RSS internet syndication standard at the age of 14 speaks about Aaron’s dedication greatly. He then co founded Reditt, a social entertainment and news website, which was later sold. His work in the latter stages of this life was focused on campaiging for internet freedom which included fighting against the Stop Online Piracy Act amongst many others. Underlining his work and progress in internet activism, was the message that some form of vigilance was needed in the online world, and that restrictions, especially from the goverments, would not be passed silently if we were to have a truly open internet. He fought for the people of the internet, for their voice, for their rights. He fought for the freedom to communicate and share online, something that if curtailed, would be against the Bill of Rights, and The Constitution of The United States and many other nations. He, in a way, reminded us of the basic rights we take for granted everyday, and how important it is to fight for them in this new age of technology which is apparently supposed to bring greater freedom.

As we became aware of Aaron’s death, this topic started doing its rounds on Twitter. Amongst many fellow tweeps expressing their condolences, sharing and remembering his works, we came across a particular project that Aaron took up in his early days as a programmer that took our attention. This project was, of all things, a Twitter conversation viewer. However minor, in the grand scheme of his works, looking at the web service he had created, we felt, well … rather full of mixed emotions. On the one hand we had a smile on our face, looked at each other and felt, what we at Conweets.com aim to do, had already been tried out by the one and only Aaron Swartz in his early years as a web developer. We couldn’t help but feel a slight, only a slight, sense of achievement. We felt proud of providing a service, similar in many ways, which at some point in time even Aaron thought could be useful for the twitter community. This feeling was quickly overwhelmed by that of grief as we again remembered about his struggles which led to his, surely untimely, passing away.

A sample twitter conversation as shown on Aaron’s Twitter Viewer

No matter what is said about this case in the future, we all feel extremely devastated about this loss. Its saddening particularly because we all, in some way, see a part of ourselves in him, whether as a person who deeply cares about the freedom of the internet, or as a developer/programmer.

May his soul rest in peace and his legacy carried forward

Now View Twitter Conversations with Ease, on your iPhone!

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Conweets

Conweets, launched as a web service in the first week of July, was initially only meant as a side project of ours. But soon it saw unexpectedly high traffic and plenty of online as well as print media coverage. The response was admittedly overwhelming. This not only pushed us to work harder to make the platform more intuitive and feature-rich, it also made us examine the possibilities of this service expanding to other platforms other than the web. Certainly, mobile was the most obvious option to expand into. So we decided to go mobile with the very first version of our iOS app!

Twitter’s official iOS app, and other clients, don’t do justice to showing conversations the way they’re meant to be presented. So we decided to start with an iOS app for Conweets that would let users track conversations right from their iOS devices. Although not meant to be an all out Twitter client by any stretch of the imagination, it aims to deliver a true conversation viewing experience in the most elegant way possible. Driving on the same algorithms and database that the web service runs on, the iPhone app does its job swiftly in the same manner in which the web service functions.

The Conweets iOS app is live on the AppStore and can be downloaded here (The app is optimized for iPhone 5)

The app, in its first version, is extremely simple to use and is in line with the web service. All you’ve got to do is Sign-in with Twitter and authorize our app. Once authorised, you’ll be presented with an interface where you can enter the handles you wish to track conversations of. At this point in time, not all features of the webapp are available on the iOS app. More updates will follow with added features.

This is only our first step into the mobile platform and there are many more platforms waiting to be explored. We’re working on that. In the meantime, we’d like as many users to try our app as possible. We’re very eagerly waiting for some honest feedback.

Five Reasons Why Users and Brands Need to Track Twitter Conversations

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Conweets

Conweets is a service which appeals to different people in different ways. Although during development of Conweets, the central idea was to provide a better conversation viewing experience for twitter users, but after being more than one month in the public beta stage, we’ve been enlightened by our users about the many different ways Conweets as a service can be used in other effective ways.
We give you five ways to make the most of tracking Twitter conversations through Conweets-

Track how a particular brand is communicating with its customers. What kind of PR it has, the kind of customer service it provides its customers via Twitter, how companies receive feedback and suggestions etc. Communication with customers over social media in something that many companies today see themselves doing, and Conweets can certainly extract revealing information about how its done from Twitter and present it to you for your assessment.
Track a brand’s tweets to see the type of conversations, the “matter” of conversations, how frequently they interact, etc and make assessments.
This is certainly something that upcoming start-up businesses might love to tap into especially because it gives the kind of insight about how a particular company’s social media marketing allows it to be successful. In addition, Conweets can allow start-ups to track conversations from a well setup brand in a specific domain, to see what features, requests, or complaints that might worry them and how to go about dealing with those issues
Stalking, lets not forget, it certainly can be used to stalk on people on Twitter! Although we hate to specify this particular usage simply because it seems a bit snoopy, but then again, there’s nothing wrong in tracking tweets which are public in the first place.
Recover lost conversations, another interesting use of Conweets (we’ll get into the details of this in a later post) is to find conversation tweets which were lost, deleted or even removed by the user/twitter for unknown reasons. Thanks to our caching engine, lost conversational tweets can be easily seen in the future even if they might not be available on twitter. Going into the details will require a separate blog post (which we’ll put up later) but to put it in a nutshell, we cache tweets. We cache i.e., store tweets so that subsequent searches can be faster, more reliable and it helps keep the Twitter servers happy. This ‘feature’, although much of it happens behind the scenes keeping true to the seamless user experience, allows users to retrieve tweets from our servers instead of twitter. So if tweets have been deleted, lost or removed from Twitter, they still remain intact and can be accessed from Conweets provided the tweets for the user account in question has been tracked before.
If you’re one of those who practically spends the majority of their day on Twitter, then time and again you’d feel the need to figure out with whom you’ve had conversations with on Twitter, and the content of it. Conweets can help you do both those things. The single user track feature can help dish out a list of Twitter users with whom you have been socializing with. Simply enter your @handle in the ‘find conversation’ box (leaving the other field blank) and perform a track. After a list is populated, you can click on any conversation to view its contents.

We hope as readers, this opened your eyes a bit towards how Conweets can be used not just to view conversations but much more.
Have you figured out another way to use Conweets. We’d love to know how you make the most of Conweets. Comment below, or tweet to us @conweets.

Why Viewing Conversations on Twitter Is Not Easy

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Conweets

Ever been misled while viewing conversations of two people using Twitter’s ‘View Conversation’ feature? Well, you are not alone. This seems to be a common finding amongst most tweeps as they claim that Twitter in many cases does not show complete conversations of users, thereby giving out only partial dialogues; usually only a pair. This needless ‘limitation’ can be particularly annoying while you are trying to read up on two peoples conversation and its shown to you as incomplete and therefore meaningless.

Conweets makes life much easier when it comes to tracking conversations. We do two things right. One, our algorithms scan an entire conversation no matter how long they are. And second, in most cases, previous conversations between the same two users are pulled up and displayed together in a single page. Hence, not only do trackers get a consolidated result, they also get a complete picture of what the two people have been talking about.

Images below clarify this issue quite clearly. What you will see below is the conversation between two Twitter users as viewed on both Twitter and Conweets. Notice the difference in the number of tweets coming up in each conversation.

Conversation via conweets-

This is a conversation tracked via Conweets. It shows all the 4 tweets which form a complete conversation

Conversation via Twitter-

This is the same conversation on Twitter, it only shows the last two tweets (even after it has been expanded)

As we’ve already mentioned, a conversation only makes sense when viewed in its entirety and that is clearly missing on Twitter and the need for a conversation tracker is certainly there. This is just what Conweets does for you, tracks conversations from Twitter and shows you the entire thread, in a way its meant to be shown.

Try tracking a conversation on Conweets and see for yourselves

Now keep track of all Twitter conversations of a single user

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Conweets

We added a new feature recently. Now its possible for you to see a list of all conversations a single user has had, and track any conversation from that list. This is cool, and really helpful.

A list of all conversations @Conweets has had on Twitter. Click on any one to view the entire thread.

There’s always scope for improvement, and we’re constantly trying to figure out ways to improve our site’s usability and user experience (UX). Since the launch of Conweets last month, we’ve been receiving a lot of feedback and suggestions. The most received suggestion was that the instructions on the site were not very clear and it was hard for first time users to figure out what we did and how they could use our site. This, coupled with the launch of a new feature, caused us to make a few changes on the site, for the better.

“How To” Slider

We’ve added a slider which explains the simple steps required to track a conversation via Conweets.

Better instructions while entering the handles

We’ve added more instructions to the form which is used to track conversations.

There are other minor site-wide changes too. Please go through the site and tell us what you feel about the new feature and the changes. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. We’ll be posting a detailed demo of the new feature very soon. Stay tuned

You can also talk to us on Twitter here

Tracking Conversations on Twitter the Easy Way

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Conweets

There’s now two ways to track or view conversations on twitter- The hard way, and the easy way. We’re here to tell you about the new easy way.

Conweets, is a tool to help users track conversations between any two users on Twitter. Twitter is primarily meant to be a micro-blogging service. However, people also interact on Twitter by “mentioning” each other or by “replying” to each other’s tweets. Conversations formed from tweets is what we like to call Conweets.

People have always had the option of clicking the “View Conversation” link on their Twitter timeline to view conversations, but there are a few drawbacks. If you wish to view a conversation that is a few days old, you’ll have to scroll all the way down, scanning for the next conversation point and maybe even use the “Find” feature of your browser cluelessly with absolutely no idea whether or not another conversation even exists . And things get worse if that conversation refers to something which was mentioned earlier in another conversation. In that case, looking for previous conversations can be taxing.

We make that simple… Authorize conweets with your account. Enter the handles of two users between whom you wish to find conversations. And that’s pretty much it. We present to you their entire conversation feed in a simple threaded form, consolidated in a single page. No more bouncing from page to page trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together. A conversation is meant to be viewed in order, chronologically, in its entirety.

Heres an example of how a conversation looks like when viewed in conweets.

@KaleyCuoco and @KunalNayyar having a conversation on Twitter. Tracked through Conweets

Tracking of conversations in not just about stalking people. Social Media Marketing is about observing patterns on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and accordingly targeting your customers and relating to them. In any business, figuring out what your customers are talking about and what they want, is half the battle; and conweets can do that for you quite easily.

We’d love to hear what you think about this new service. Tell us about how you use conweets. Comment below or talk to us on twitter @conweets (we’re nice people, we don’t bite ).

Conweets is now Blogging!

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Conweets

Hey folks!

We will now be blogging about existing features, new features, tutorials and much more right here in this space. We’ll also be talking about how Conweets can help you as a Twitter user, a brand or an organization from getting information on conversations to targeting potential customers for your business and everything in between.

Our blog will keep you updated on any changes to Conweets and inform you about new services and how you can use them.

Give us a follow on twitter @conweets. Happy tracking!