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.
This article is a great help to me! Thank you!
Finally, a site that has potential to pick up TweeTree’s slack & over from TweetMeme’s disappearance.. okay, firstly, the most important thing is custom options- for example, the “look” of the site. The colors, the background- notice how TweeTree’s design had this down amazingly perfect! (It’s a real shame that site’s been abandoned) Second, direct links. This whole “find a conversation” still makes it even more difficult, the constant clicking for more mysterious loading, etc. If you could fix it so that it was yoursite.com/twitterusername/postidnumberhere or even better, without the username & just the tweet iD (basically, I could go straight to any tweet & see the full convo without searching from a user’s many other convos & without the SN makes it safer for potential SN changes) & then we could see all the tweets replying to that one, regardless if they received ongoing replies or not, that would be ~brilliant! I could go on but I’ll save it for later. Final notes would be the “sort by oldest/latest” is currently counter-intuitive, as it doesn’t specify the present choice; it would be better like this: “sorting by: [oldest] | newest” with one in brackets being highlighted as the present choice & the other as the linkable alternative. Hope that helps, would love to see how this site grows & hopefully sticks around unlike many others before it! xoxoxo PS. I thought the name was “conTweets”.. hmm, might want to rethink that, as “conWeets” just doesn’t have the same ring & might be confusing on a large scale. ;D
Hi!
Thank you for such a lovely and honest feedback. Regarding direct links, we’re not sure if we’re on the same page, but we do have permalinks of the form http://www.conweets.com/user1/user2/ which will show the conversations IF they have been tracked earlier by someone. And about the feature that would let you view all replies to a single tweet, Twitter already does the exact same thing. And like we all know, Twitter does not like apps imitating itself. However, we’ll see if we can do something about it. Note taken about the “Sort by” issue. Re the name, contweets was already taken, so we went ahead with Conweets
They ~actively “do not like” apps improving on their interface? I actually did not kno that for a fact, no.. but I would think they’d welcome it, since they’re the ones who wanted to alienate so many users who prefer the simplified, non-flashy version of their site before they futurized it, lol. By an app being made that enables their site to be much easier to use, it means more ppl will stick with their site in the long run. Ah well. // I suppose there ~is a bit of different page confusion, as Twitter does NOT do the “exact same thing” as it never ever shows “all replies” (only the first few) but is also randomly missing bits of the convo all the time (especially ones without further replies) & in fact in order to get the replies to the first reply, you have to go to that reply’s own individual page.. & so on & on. Plus, you need the direct links for all replies in said conversation to fully follow them. I guess I was just hoping for too much in thinking you could progress to be the new TweeTree, because if you are simply going to be only an archive of things “after the fact” ie you would only ever be able to archive stuff after someone has already used you to find that something, well without the potential for growth, it’s really not that useful overall.. // When I said, “direct links”, it was as I mentioned, a way to get to just one thing we’re looking for- particularly concerning users who have ~many interactions, a kind of, “how was this tweet involved in what conversations” type thing, you kno? Thanks for replying nonetheless, it is much appreciated! ;P
Oh, I should also clarify.. but another thing I’d really love is to find ANY tweets from one person to another, regardless if they are in a convo thread or not, regardless of being a reply or receiving any replies, etc ie “from thisperson to thatperson” basically I would want to see all of thisperson’s tweets that include thatperson’s name.. that’s what I think of when I read that particular link, for example: http://conweets.com/SimbiAni/Twitter/ if it could find all my tweets to @Twitter (I kno I’ve done quite a few), that’d be totally awesome! So anyway, I really hope you understand the idea I’m trying to explain.. & that it’s possible! xoxoxo
Okay, I’ve just found one example I can show of a conversation you’ve pretty much missed because of the current format of both your layout & Twitter’s own wonky shortcomings:
First, after “tracking” (your term for looking up?) these two: http://conweets.com/mollydollyy/freddiemsmith/ I sorted them to start with the oldest. The first one I see is “oh hey there” on May03/2011, but that’s a reply & it doesn’t say what it’s replying to, just what the next one in reply to that says, “hey you”. Checking on Twitter (which does NOT show “hey you” as a reply, pfft lol) does get me the first post that started that convo, but after “hey you” I could find no further replies. Now on to the next one..
The next Con-bubble has “go wait in the car” as a starting point, but again, it isn’t. So I check on Twitter just in case (do appreciate the “original” linking under the timemark, always love when archival sites remember to do that!) & I find there’s indeed a bit more.. a total of three tweets leading up to the “go wait in the car” one! (all only to be found when clicked thru individually, of course) Hmm, now you see what I mean with the dream of direct linking but with all of them in one place? ;P If I want to get the entire single convo on one page, I’d have to dig them up using both your site & Twitter (& likely Google too) then copy/pasting them myself somewhere for reference.
Just thought of one last thing- timemarks, could you post the timeZONE next to them (I mean, as it is now, I have no idea what zone you are using), & then give an option on how to view the site? I prefer EST, so I usually “read” everything that way, unless it specifically mentions what it really is, so that would be extremely helpful- thanks!
Hi Ani,
We are really really excited about the lovely feedback and opinions you’re giving us. If our previous reply came off as a we-dont-listen-to-our-users kind of a reply, we apologize. We’ve taken note of every single feedback you’ve given us and are working on them already. About the all-replies to a tweet issue, we were not aware Twitter even here doesn’t do a good job. Now that you’ve brought that to our notice, we’re looking at it.
Regarding getting ANY tweets from one user to another user, we’re seeing how we can incorporate that as well. Next up, about the conversation you tracked (mollydolly and freddiesmith) and brought up as an example, we could not see any of the issues you pointed out. Could you try visiting the conversation again and seeing if you still see those issues? For example, in the first conversation (sorted by oldest first), we see 3 tweets in all. In the second conversation, we see 4 tweets in total. We really didn’t change anything. So in case the conversations are loading up differently to different users, we seriously need to look into that issue.
We’d like to reiterate, we have taken a note of every suggestion of yours.
Thanks!
Ayush