Tech news aggregator TechFuga has some new features this morning, including a new news clustering algorithm, easier-to-read graphics, more news sources, and better news search. The one feature I really like is that it now searches Twitter, in addition to all of the news sources it keeps track of.
For instance, here is a search for “Greystripe,” which had some funding news earlier today. Our post shows up, but above it appears all of the Twitter chatter about the news as well. Notice that the Twitter results appear above the blog post results. But nevertheless, you get a unified view of what people are saying about this particular topic.
TechFuga’s overall layout is a mixture of Techmeme and Alltop. The big headlines of the day are clustered above the fold much like on Techmeme. In fact, you will find most of the same stories on Techmeme. Where TechFuga begins to differentiate itself is with a column of developing news on the right, and tabs along the top which let you view more top news, latest news, and upcoming news.
If you go below the fold on the homepage, you are presented with an Alltop-style view of the last eight headlines from each of TechFuga’s top news sources, which include mostly other news aggregators such as Techmeme, Hacker News, Digg, Google News, BlogRunner, and Yahoo Buzz.
this is fantastic! the game is getting interesting now
Wonder if GOOG or other popular search engines will ever accept the fact that Twitter is a source of real-time news..
looks good.
lol @ “news clustering algorithm”
Twitter search is nice – though keyword-based searching is going to return a lot of noise for words less narrow in scope than “greystripe.”
Also, the news clustering algorithm is still shotgunning things (i.e.: including a lot of noise) – expand any of the “more” content lists and there’s a real mix or related and not.
That being said, nice to see it still being worked on – I can appreciate the challenges of effective news clustering.
Yeah, I have been waiting to see news getting collected from Twitter. I have been playing around with their API as well.
Why would anyone attack the mother-ship? Google supplies the content and can easily adjust the presentation to suit users. We don’t need a Google replacement.
Dash, I don’t think it’s attacking the mothership. Google can’t be all things to all people. I think this aggregator is just trying to give online readers of tech buzz a better news aggregation service. There are plenty of nitches where the pygmies can between the legs of the elephant mothership known as google. I’ll bookmark it and stop by to see what stories are served.
I know you didn’t want to copy webware’s headline but a) it’s popurls-, not alltop-style and b) popurls has had twitter search for ages http://search.p...m/?q=greystripe
Speaking of Twitter search, has anyone found a way to add timezone to the from/since parameters in the search API?
They do everything in GMT and I’d really like to be able to retrieve Tweets from a specific day here in my locale.
Any help appreciated…
TL
P.S. You can see the way I’m trying to use it here… http://jamtopia...wit/2009-03-07/ … but b/c of the timezone thing it thinks March 6th ends at 6pm central time (GMT -6)
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Checkout the Twitter interface at http://fonet.mobi which has search also for twitter
Hmmmmm, very interesting!
Every product/feature/company with the techmeme “Twitter” in its name or description is hip and will get investor’s money massively.
Agree?
I wonder how many of the twitter results will actually be ppl “talking” about it vs. simply posting that the announcement happened? I can see the value in assessing buzz / interest as ppl post (tho that can even be argued) but to as you say Eric “get a unified view of what people are saying” I’m more skeptical. But it’s interesting and I’ll check it out @retrevo_robb