Survey Results

We've been asking our beta testers if they could spare a few minutes to fill out a short survey for us. We'd hoped it would help us identify the types of users that were interested in signing up for a beta (some might even say alpha!) version of our software. We have to say that the results have been fantastic. Not only do we have a good idea of the types of 'Twittergraphic' our future users might fall into but we've also identified which features you guys feel are, currently, most important to you. Everything you mentioned is on our todo list - but now we can prioritise the ones that will have the biggest benefit.

We are still trying to contact everyone who completed the survey to offer our personal thanks. Some of you even went further than the structure of our survey and suggested new ideas that we hadn't even considered! This gets us excited. Users that suggest new concepts we hadn't thought of are priceless and we'd love to talk with you further.

We'll try to get at least one new version out by the end of this year. As some of you may have read in my latest personal blog post, Time to Move On, we are now going to start pushing development on apace.

So, again, huge thanks to everyone who's helped us get the ball rolling in 2010. In 2011 we're going to repay you all by building something stunning!

Silverlight, PivotViewer and TweetPivot. Where now?

Unless you've been living under a virtual rock for the past few months you couldn't have escaped the gossip surrounding Silverlight's future. At its heart is the suggestion that Microsoft may be ditching it in favour of the new HTML5 standard. At this year's PDC Bob Muglia made a slight gaff during interview that further flamed the dissent on this technology. He has since written a blog post clarifying his position.

So, let me clarify our position at TweetPivot.

Yes, we are a Microsoft-centric company. We are proud members of the BizSpark program and use Microsoft development environments, tools and frameworks to deliver our solutions. And that's the key - they're just tools. The PivotViewer control is a fantastic piece of work originally created by the Live Labs team. It does quite a few things that we don't utilise and it doesn't do a whole host of things we'd like it to; but it's a starting point.

PivotViewer and, indeed, Silverlight have enabled us to get going with our ideas about how people should be interacting with social media. What is core to what we do are our ideas, not the technology we use to implement them.

We have a very strong internal product road-map that will enable us to deliver our ideas to all devices and form-factors. Technologies will come and go, but our ideas are independent of these changes and remain of great value to our users.

BizSpark Summit 2010

On 23rd September TweetPivot attended the BizSpark Summit at Microsoft's offices in London. We had an exhilarating couple of days meeting the great people that work on this team and other startups that are part of the program. Huge thanks to Bindi Karia, Cliff Reeves and Belinda for all the help and coaching they freely offered.

The highlight, of our day at least, was the opportunity to pitch what we do as part of the Pitch Session. The judges presented a rather daunting facade through which to penetrate:

• Per Roman, Partner, GP Bullhound
• Julie Meyer, CEO and Founder, Ariadne Capital
• Sean Seton-Rogers, General Partner, PROfounders Capital
• Lars Lindstedt, Software Economist, Microsoft

Although we did not win we were delighted with the response and reactions from everyone there. You can watch our pitch and get a sneak preview of our new twitter client here. In the media player click 'More' and then select the 'BizSpark Summit Pitch Session'. Our pitch starts at 1 hour 3 minutes.

Why is our Beta Trial Delayed?

As many of you know, we were expected to start rolling out our new twitter client to some beta-triallers a couple of days ago. So, what's the delay?

1. Infrastructure Issues

Our server-side architecture had to change significantly to enable the uber-cool functionality that our twitter client relies on. As is always the case with software development, this threw up some unexpected difficulties. We simply hadn't envisaged the complexity required to adjust to, and fix, these.

2. SSL Certificate

We've been trying to order an SSL certificate from 123-Reg. Their level of service has been very poor with no communication when problems occurs. They have until lunchtime to deliver otherwise we're off to Go Daddy.

3. Breaking changes to Twitter API

Within the past few days Twitter made some changes to their API that has broken the 3rd-party library we're using. The fault developed because a, previously assumed, numeric field in their response now sometimes has the value "100+". This causes exceptions when you expect it to actually be a number! We know the library authors are working hard to fix this but we just have to wait for them.

So, where are we?

Issue 1 has been fixed, but issues 2 and 3 are still outstanding. As soon as they're resolved, we're ready to roll.

Apologies to everyone that's waiting for this trial. We really appreciate your patience and we'll let you know the instant it becomes available.

Twitter & TweetPivot announce 2 new Twitter Clients

Last night we announced our new Twitter Client. Little did we know that only a few short hours later Twitter were going to announce theirs. If you study the 'numbers' very carefully it does look as though @ev and @biz got slightly more press coverage than us, but we're trying to catch them up!

Twitter has done what it should have done a long time ago - revamp its website. After all, 78% of Twitter users still use it so it was well overdue some TLC. This move certainly reduces the differentiator that the leading 3rd-party Twitter clients have enjoyed. The website may now be "just good enough" to suppress power users' temptations to look for a fuller client.

However, we believe that the TweetPivot Twitter Client still stands apart from the crowd. We have made a departure from the usual fixed-column approach and developed a client whose core area is dynamic.

So, if you're looking for something different, something remarkable and you'd like to have a say in how it's developed why not sign up for the beta trial?

Helping Non-Profit Organisations find Volunteers with @TweetPivot

I have been on the look out for ways that TweetPivot could develop its social mission.

Recently @NetSquared tweeted:

How are you recruiting volunteers online? Share your expertise for this month's #Net2ThinkTank! (@ reply us or see: http://bit.ly/9iN6cI )

This got me thinking about how visualising Twitter followers using TweetPivot could be used to identify potential new volunteers for non-profit organisations.

It seems reasonable to me that a good place for an organisation to start looking for volunteers would be amongst its Twitter followers. Tweeps that follow a non-profit organisation on Twitter are likely to have an interest in its cause, indeed some may already be active volunteers. Others may be more passive supporters who could be 'converted' to volunteers, given the right circumstances and approach. For example, the non-profit organisation could use direct messages (DMs) to engage targeted followers individually on Twitter with a personalised approach tailored to their interests. Such approaches take time and care to do well, therefore careful selection of who to target is important to efficiently attract more volunteers. This is where TweetPivot can help.

By using appropriate filters in TweetPivot a non-profit organisation can reduce a follower list to a smaller number of people to target. For example, if you are looking for volunteers for an event in a particular location, then a filter can be used to quickly identify followers in that area. You could then filter out the ones who are not very active on Twitter (e.g. with a small Follower Count) as they are unlikely to respond to your DMs. If you need to reduce the number of 'Tweep targets' further, then you could restrict your list to people with a reasonable Klout score (a measure of Twitter influence).

Once your subset of followers is identified, you can save them to a Twitter list. You can then monitor the tweets of this group and spot openings for a Twitter conversation.

As an example, in response to a tweet looking for volunteers for an event to be held in the UK, we looked at the 2500+ @crisiscamp followers: http://bit.ly/9jrxwI and used location filters to select just followers who are based in the London, then saved them to a Twitter list.

A video of this process can be seen at: http://bit.ly/9nh5P2

If you try this approach, then let us know if you find it useful as a way of finding new volunteers in the comments below or by replying to @tweetpivot.

New facets in TweetPivot and discovering Kryten likes fast cars too

TweetPivot is used to filter and sort Twitter friends, followers or lists from multiple angles or facets. The original set of facets included Followers Count, Klout Score, Klout Class, and Location. Recently TweetPivot added two new facets to its collections: 'Member Since' and 'Tweets Count', which allow you to visualise the spread of Twitter longevity and activity-levels, and slice and dice Twitter data using these criteria.

We have analysed the 2000+ Followers for @bloodhound_ssc (the supersonic car that aims to go 1000 mph and inspire the next generation to study STEM - science, technology,

engineering and mathematics) using Klout scores and the new facet 'Member Since'. Below is a screen-shot of the collection sorted by year of joining Twitter.

Zooming in to the 83 followers who joined Twitter in 2007, the monthly distribution can be seen:

Keeping the 2007 filter on, if we sort by Klout score, then we can see that there is a spread of klout scores, with 0-10 being most prevalent (perhaps surprising for a group who have been twittering for so long?).

Zooming in on the guy with the most klout, we see that it is bobbyllew (Robert Llewelyn), otherwise known as the android Kryten from one of my favourite TV programs Red Dwarf.

I once saw Robert Llewelyn give an after dinner speech, and I am tickled to discover that we're both fans of Bloodhound_SSC, in fact, I think I'll go join his list of followers now.

Give TweetPivot a whirl and see who you discover. Please leave a comment if there are additional facets you'd like to see in the future.

Twitter Elite Women

Earlier today Twitter Grader published a list that, according to their scoring system, contains The 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter. Here at TweetPivot we thought it would be interesting to add them all to a public twitter list and then create one of our collections from it.

You can browse the TweetPivot collection here.

We've actually only managed to explore 97 of the 100 as 2 didn't exist (@x_tinaaa08 & @miss_gorgeous88) and 1 was protected (@laniar). In addition to our usual data we've also added in their rankings ('Elite Women Position'). So, what did we learn?

Firstly we sorted by Klout Class. This gives a good indication of the 'twittergraphic' makeup of our collection. Straight away it's evident that there're an unusually high number of 'Thought Leaders' and 'Taste Makers' in this group. Hardly surprising, though, as this is not a randomly selected set.



Secondly we selected the top 10 women based on Klout Score to see how this compared to the Twitter Grader ranking. 9 are reasonably matched but one (@Melanie_putria) is a big outlier. She scores an impressive 62.9 on the Klout Score, yet is position 83 on the Twitter Grader scale!



Next up we selected the top 10 women as ranked by Twitter Grader and then sorted them by the Klout Score. We can see that, even though all these women score a 'flat' 100 in the published list they have a much more normally distributed set of Klout Scores. We'd be interested to know if Twitter Grader have hit a ceiling?



The number of status updates (tweets) posted by the women has a nice slope to it - apart from the clear winner, @yeagerhood, with a whopping 132,374!



Pretty much all of the top 100 women are based in the US, with almost a third in California. Any surprises? Probably not.

We'd love to hear what insights other people can gain from this collection - post them in the comments please.

New: Save Twitter Lists Interactively Created with TweetPivot

Feedback from some newcomers to TweetPivot ran along the lines of:

"cool use of technology that's of interest to the curious looking for insights into their twitterverse"

However, when they were asked to explain how they would use these insights, pausing and head-scratching ensued. We believe that, with the new ability to save twitter lists, we are a step closer to making TweetPivot a useful, reusable tool...

Many Twitter users recognise that building up highly-customised Twitter lists is a great route to managing the firehose of Twitter information and maximising the relevance of updates they receive. However, it is time-consuming to build a custom list one person at a time, and simply adopting a large list from another Twitter user may leave you drowning in tweets. TweetPivot can help by making it easy to interactively chop down existing lists to increase their relevance. New functionality allows you to save the results as a custom Twitter list to be picked up by your favourite Twitter client.

If you've already tried TweetPivot, then you'll know that it enables you to interactively explore friends, followers and lists for any unprotected Twitter account and graphically identify a subset of people based on criteria such as location and influence (as measured by Klout). In the latest release of TweetPivot you can now save the results of your pivot exploration as a Twitter list.

To give it a go:

1. Go to the TweetPivot website
2. Pick a Twitter account of interest
3. Pivot its friends, followers or one of its lists
4. Interactively select a subset of interesting people
5. Save as a new list
6. Receive relevant tweets in Twitter or your favorite Twitter client

Follow @TweetPivot for updates, including an announcement of a upcoming video of how to use the new functionality.

TweetPivot goes Interactive!

We published a new feature today that has gotten us very excited at TweetPivot. Tanya Morton will be publishing a post later today that discusses more of the benefits but, for now, here's the mechanics.

Over the past few weeks thousands of people have been using our software to investigate collections of twitter users; but it's been a read-only process. Now, once you've found a subset of interesting users, we'll allow you to save them 'en masse' to one of your Twitter Lists.

This does require that you grant us access to your Twitter account but I've already blogged about what we will and won't do with that trust here.

This is what the new interface looks like - note the new button at the top 'Save Users to a Twitter List'. I've already filtered the collection so that it just contains people that Klout considers to be Socializers.



The first time you click this new button you'll need to tell Twitter that we can access your account details.



Clicking the 'Login via Twitter' link will redirect you to a page owned by Twitter where you can enter your username and password. Note: we don't ever know what your password is. All we need is the 7 digit number that Twitter gives you which you should enter in the textbox marked 'PIN'. If you keep the 'Follow @tweetpivot' checkbox ticked you'll be able to keep informed about improvements to our service, but you are free to uncheck this. Click OK to move onto the List Selector screen...



If you've already created the list you want to add your selection to, just click OK. Alternatively, click the 'New List' button to create one...



Click OK and TweetPivot will start working. You'll see a 'busy' graphic at the top of the TweetPivot window but you can still continue to manipulate the whole collection you loaded.



Finally, we'll show you a notification window telling you that all the selected users are now in the list. You then have the option to automatically jump to that list on Twitter.com.

We hope you have as much fun using this feature as we had building it!

How we treat your authentication at TweetPivot

A few weeks ago I posted an article on my personal blog entitled 'Social Network Authorisation Needs to Change'. In it I vented my frustration at the liberties some 3rd-party Twitter sites take with the trust given to them by interested users. Today, TweetPivot has launched a new feature that, in order to be used, requires our users to grant us access to their accounts. So, I wanted to publicly declare what we will and won't do with the authorisation you grant us to your Twitter account.

What we will do

1. We will tell your account to follow @tweetpivot during login if, and only if, you tell us that's OK.
2. We will read the names and member counts of lists, both public and private, that you have created when you need this information to make informed decisions.
3. We will create new lists, either public or private, upon your specific request.
4. We will add users to lists you create when requested to do so.

What we will NOT do

1. We will NOT post unsolicited tweets in your name.
2. We will NOT access any part of you Twitterverse not mentioned in the previous list.
3. We will NOT retain the authorisation details beyond a specific session. In other words, when you close your browser TweetPivot's access is terminated.

As more features are added to TweetPivot we will need to amend these 2 lists; but we will do so publicly.

We hope that this starts a positive trend followed by all 3rd-party Twitter apps to declare, and stick to, their intentions.

List Suggestions for You - the next Twitter feature?

With the twitterverse expanding at an mind-boggling rate, the challenge of identifying relevant and interesting content is becoming ever-more difficult. To combat this challenge, Twitter recently announced its new Suggestions for You capability that helps you identify interesting people to follow. The natural extension of this functionality would be for Twitter to make List Suggestions for You.

At TweetPivot we hope Twitter is already working on this feature, as list suggestions would be a great compliment to the functionality in TweetPivot that allows you to interactively explore lists.   If anyone from Twitter is reading this, we'd love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, however you discover new lists, you can use TweetPivot to help determine if the list is for you or not. 

Follow @TweetPivot on Twitter for more list-based innovation coming soon... 

Tweet Pivot joins Microsoft BizSpark

We are extremely pleased to announce that Tweet Pivot has been accepted onto Microsoft's BizSpark program.

The potential that this program gives us (through software, support & visibility) to make huge leaps forward with our development cannot be under-estimated.

Watch this space!

Discover Lists with Tweet Pivot

We've just added a great new feature to Tweet Pivot - the ability to pivot someone's Lists. Firstly, if you don't know what twitter lists are you should read Mashable's guide.

All you have to do is enter a user's screen name and, if they've created any, their lists will be displayed under the usual links to their friends and followers. Hovering over the "Lists" button will expand it to show the actual lists.



What's exciting about this development is the added richness that's apparent from pivoting lists as opposed to someone's friends or followers. People in lists tend to be, at a minimum, interesting - otherwise they wouldn't be in it. We've also found that the quality of the Klout data we import seems to be much better across a collection of list members compared to collections of friends or followers.

This new feature opens up some amazingly rich veins of twitter data. A very quick web search found this article by Marshall Kirkpatrick on Read Write Web: 10 Twitter Lists You Should Follow. Here are links to the Tweet Pivot collections based on the lists in the article.

1. Patrick LaForge: Linkers
2. Josh Elman: Awesome Social
3. Robert Scoble: Founders
4. Rebecca Leaman: Nonprofit Geeks
5. Chris Grayson: Augmented Reality Peeps
6. Mike Taylor: XMPP List
7. Raven Zachary: iPhone List
8. Christina Braden: Disability List
9. Ben Turner: Anthropology List
10. The ReadWriteWeb: Team List

As always, please tell us what you think and, if you like Tweet Pivot, retweet us.

Off to a Flying Start

It's only 24 hours since we published the new Silverlight version of TweetPivot. This made it available to anyone running a 'modern' browser. In just that short space of time we've had over 150 new collections built and almost 500 unique visitors.

So far the site has coped admirably with the increased load and we haven't had any reports of collection requests failing - everything's been built.

We've also been receiving lots of great, positive comments and exposure from users. Special thanks to Pete Brown who posted a great tweet to his 2000 followers.

By far the biggest negative comment we have received has related to the speed of generating new collections. It takes about 3 minutes to generate a collection of 1000 twitter users. We know that this is far too long and are working hard to resolve it. Technically:

"Every profile image of every user in the collection needs to be converted to a Deep Zoom Image. Once all these have been done they are then all combined into a Deep Zoom Collection. The first part of this process is very intensive and, unfortunately, doesn't seem to run well in a parallel environment. In fact, when utilising .Net 4's Parallel Task Library it actually doubles the conversion time! This process is currently responsible for over 75% of the overall time it takes to create and deliver a new collection."

Finally, a huge "thank you" to everyone who has shown interest in TweetPivot. We have a mountain of amazing new features that we can now start adding to the application. Follow us and we can keep you informed.

TweetPivot gets Silverlight Upgrade

Well, it's finally here - the Silverlight Pivot plugin to replace the "old" Pivot Browser.

We have worked hard to quickly upgrade our existing website to incorporate this newly available control and we're thrilled that we have this working within 2 days of the Microsoft release!

So, what does this mean for you?

Firstly, you can now experience the goodness of TweetPivot on any modern browser that supports Silverlight. Secondly, it opens our product development roadmap - there're going to be a lot of new features coming very soon!

Finally, please remember that this is our initial offering and it needs a little polish and TLC. We're working on the rough edges right now, but we wanted to get you something to play with as soon as we could.

Click on the 'try it' button on the left or go to http://tweetpivot.com to start.

Introduction to Tweet Pivot

Tweet Pivot offers a brand new way to view your 'twitterverse'. By combining Twitter Data, 3rd-Party Twitter Analysis and Microsoft Live Labs Pivot technology you can now discover insights into your Twitter presence that were previously not possible.

Over the coming weeks and months we will be working hard to improve Tweet Pivot in a number of ways...

More Analysis

We current only utilise data from one 3rd-party source: Klout. We have another 6 twitter analysis sites that we will be aggregating into our offering. All these products already offer amazing stand-alone information; we see combining them will create a whole product that's even greater than the sum of its parts.

Pivot Silverlight Plugin

This should be available from Microsoft Live Labs by the end of this month and we will be using it immediately. What this means for our users is that they'll be able to use Tweet Pivot from every modern browser / operating system combination.

Video Use Case Studies

Whilst it is very quick and easy to understand the mechanics of what Tweet Pivot can do you may not be able to immediately see the reasons why you might use it. Fortunately, we can. We will be regularly releasing videos via our YouTube channel investigating case studies focusing on different vertical markets.

Premium Trial

We are in the midst of developing our Premium offering for businesses. We know that there is a market for this and are hugely excited by the value that we can add to those engaged in commerce and marketing on Twitter. To get this up and running we will be starting a 'Closed Beta' trial in the next couple of months. Details on how to sign up to this will be made available nearer the time.

Now watch the video...

We think the best way to explain what Tweet Pivot's all about is to simple show you. So, here's a very short video introduction; and, once you've watched it, why not go and try it?