Twitter has established itself as the best place to find real time information, but anyone who has tried using its native search engine at search.twitter.com has probably found that it leaves a lot to be desired — aside from the day’s ‘top trends’, Twitter does very little to help surface results that are worthwhile. TC50 finalist Instattant may have the answer. The startup has built a new engine for monitoring real-time news, that can also be leveraged to track brands, ad campaigns, and basically everything else that pops up on Twitter.
The site features an analytics platform that can perform semantic analysis on Tweets as they come in — in other words, it can tell what a tweet is talking about, and if it has a positive or negative sentiment. The site can also identify links and media that are rapidly rising in popularity, and displays headlines in real-time as they come in. For Tweets with media, the site allows users to view photos and play videos inline.
The top of the site features a list of headlines, detailing some top trends being seen on Twitter (for example, it could say that 77% of the tweets about the movie Extract are positive). If you’re interested about a certain topic or person, you can run a search for them and the site will present a list of top headlines related to that query, along with quick stats about the keyword’s appearances. If you run a search on a user, you can see what other users they’re related to and how much influence they have. To help further refine searches Insttant can filter by location, so you can hone in on tweets that most relevant to you.
Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble:
DC: I think market for this for advertisers/marketers it’s great. But I think it would be hard to make this appealing to end users and advertisers at once.
MS: Do you track all topics, is there a limit to what topics? How real time is it?
A: It’s all topics. We’ll look at “Toyota is___”, “I don’t like ___”. To help determine what something is.
RH: I think that getting a lot of different versions of analysis of what’s happening on the real time web is interesting. I think it will be challenging to have a user experience where users are participating in the real time web, and also offering an analytic overlay. I think this would be good for marketers.
Video:
Other Coverage:
TC50: Insttant provides a snapshot of real-time news VentureBeat.
Insttant.com – Real Time People Generated News at TechCrunch50 YouVox.
Should we be concerned that they can’t get the email submission form on their home page to work?
works for me!!
Twitter embraces every field. Everyday Twitter grows rapidly, now Insttant utilizes Twitter’s public stream to generate a simple, comprehensive review of real time happenings. This tie up brings the ability to convert real time real time news headlines.
Looks interesting, but just tried to request a beta invite and got a page not found on their submission form. Big oops!
Working for me now.
I still like simple…http://www.tweetalarm.com sends you an email when someone tweets about your company, product or interest…like google alerts for twitter. simple=useful IMHO – anyway, wrote it on a rainy saturday and it saves me a few trips to twitter search a day
I’m curious what they are using for semantic analysis, and more importantly, are they creating owl or rdf knowledgebases about companies? If so, these could be tied to web pages marked up in rdf by opencalais. I have a feeling that the text analysis is GATE.
No comments about the silly name and inevitable leakage to instant.com?
It’s going to compete with bunch of other real-time search companies. However, this company seems to be doing sentiment analysis which is cool. I would guess their closest competitor would be http://www.boilingpage.com which is my personal favorite. BoilingPage does sentiment analysis too on different verticals and lists the hot stuff like for music, it’s in http://music.boilingpage.com, movies in http://movies.boilingpage.com etc
Four weeks work masquerading as a business (80% of this is old stuff that exists in all the current twitter meme products).
I like it, a great idea launched by a 19 year old entrepreneur. I think we may see more and more young people like this.
moving towards an opinion engine, very cool..