Nsyght

Making Twitter discussions as good as Friendfeed

So users were pretty happy when we released the feature to notify you when someone replies to you on twitter. That in itself is pretty powerful, because let’s face it, we aren’t logged into Twitter 24/7 just yet. So we recognized that only solved part of the problem.

With services like Friendfeed you can receive an email alert when someone replies to a discussion you are subscribed to, but with nsyght, we just notified you when someone replied to just YOU. Well today that changes. Now, nsyght is able to alert you when someone replies to a discussion that your involved with, just like Friendfeed, so even if the reply is not to you directly. This is pretty interesting, so much “discussion” is lost on twitter with the furious pace of the firehose, and the lack of context from the myriad of @ replies we get in our stream. So, now not only can you search for and discover interesting discussions, but you can also make sure you are kept aware of what people are saying long after you’ve gone.

Ok, we didn’t stop there. Now that you will have your finger on the pulse, we realized that this means your going to WANT to be involved in a lot more discussions. What if we sent you a mail about a comment that you really wanted to reply to, but for whatever reason were too busy to login, was dashing into a taxi, or planned to visit some friendly totalitarian regime that frowned on twitter? Well, worry not, because now you can post discussion replies via email!

And faster than you can say Vint Cerf, viola! Your post is added to the realtime discussion!

As always, feedback welcome.

Spot a trend before it trends. Nsyght gets popularity

Last week at twiistup in LA we demoed a powerful new feature, showing what’s popular. Well today its ready for general release and it’s pretty cool. So what does it do?

We now can show you what’s popular on the site, either news articles, videos, or even photos. Ok a bunch of people do this kind of trending with twitter right? Well, we do more than twitter, we also take into account what is being shared on Facebook too.

Our popularity engine updates in real time, but as you can see, you can chose to see what is trending today, and this week too.

But wait, there’s more!

One of the things we focus on is adding context to your real time stream. What good is a link if your not entirely sure what that link contains? Well, never be rickrolled again, because nsyght now can display a preview right in the tweet/post itself:

Adding context is really important for us, but so is discoverability. We’ve gotten a lot of praises on our ability to thread twitter conversations in real time. The problem? Threading is only part of the battle, you also have to be able to find discussions too. So we’ve also released a cool filter to allow you to see only discussions in your realtime stream, and of course you can even search for just discussions too:

So you can view all these great discussions on twitter and facebook, but what about discussions that span both services? There are a lot of people that post similar things to both services, to keep up with both discussions today, users essentially have to go to both services. Not anymore, now nsyght can merge discussions from both services together, allowing you to have one discussion in one place:

But wait, there’s more!

Actually no, that’s enough for one release don’t you think? Well we are all very excited about the release today, a lot of hard work has gone into it. As always, we would appreciate your feedback and please watch this space. The have a lot more cool stuff in store over the next few weeks.

What’s fixed, what’s broken

Special thanks to @charlvn, we spotted and fixed a problem with registering new accounts via OpenID providers. Appologies everyone, a final stability build we pushed before going live broke it for registrations only (login for existing users, or associating an OpenID with an existing account was fine).

Additionally, we have discovered a small bug in our Vimeo and Digg crawlers, so for the sake of stability they have been taken offline. Sorry for the inconvenience, but we will fix this first thing tomorrow.

Hey, you can’t launch a big product without having a few bugs right? Thanks for your patience everyone…

RC 0.3

Release Candidate 0.3 has been released.

Feature summaries will not be available until we reach preview status (RC 0.5).