It’s pretty obvious that wherever you are in the world, you’re usually looking for the best bar, hotel, venue you can get for your money. And all the information is out there now, especially on live streams like Twitter. The problem is searching it and finding it. So if you could somehow match tweets to actual venues you could also use that data to rate the venue itself.
The other thing you could do would be to create trust around the actual users who submitted the information. That could form into a network of users who trusted eachother’s recommendations. There was an early implementation of this in the UK some time ago called Buzzspotr, but it never got beyond the Alpha stage and fizzled out.
Now, mobile startup Rummble is trying to crack this nut with a non-core product which just might actually super-charge their existing recommendations service.
Tremors is their new Twitter app which does the following: it attempts to match tweets to venues, based on a combination of fuzzy word matching, the general location the tweet came from and then a rough estimation of whether the Tweet was positive or negative about the venue. It’s not perfect but, of course, it will improve as more people use it. Right now it works in London, New York and Austin, Texas (the SXSW venue). These are a natural fit as they are likely to have a critical mass of Twitter users – San Francisco isn’t long now.
It’s not totally intuitive yet, and it needs more Tweets about venues – but that’s why we’re telling you about it on TechCrunch, so we can see if this thing will fly.
But already it will tell you where are the “Tweetiest” places in London. Earlier today it was Jimmy Choo’s shop on New Bond Street. Which either suggests there are some very well-heeled Twitterers out there, or that women love to tell you about what they like and don’t like, much more than men. Or have I read that wrong?
You don’t need a Rummble account to use Tremors, but if you login with your Twitter account (or you can use an existing Rummble account) Tremors will start to follow you and start to build a trust network for you, so in theory you can soon see who else on Twitter you share the same tastes and recommendations with.
I first read this as “Truemors” and my first thought was FAIL.
location awareness will add value to any service.
http://teentechguru.com/2009/06/leopard-theme-for-windows-7/
I read Truemors as well. These guys are screwed on that alone.
I think this is an awesome idea but the data is really tough to parse until Twitter adds a lat/long to each tweet. There will be lots of false positives.
For instance, Jimmy Choo is #1 in England right now because people are tweeting about H&M planning to sell Jimmy Choo bags and shoes. They aren’t tweeting about the actual store. Here’s the twitter search result: http://unhub.com/9k8Y
I agree, especially for chain stores or those matching a particular brand name. A first step might be to be stricter on allowing tweets which are geolocated only very close to such places, but even then mistakes will occur.
It needs A LOT of work. It thinks #spymaster is a place.
Spymaster is actually a shop in London, but obviously the tweets were not to do with that. A closer analysis of the tweets is needed to stop false positives like these, but we haven’t got round to doing this yet.
This is interesting. I would like to bring to your attention that with recent advances in technology a whole new way of analyzing relevant data to any user need has now become possible. Perhaps the best illustration of this interesting phenomena is the product TipTop that was launched just last week at http://www.feeltiptop.com TipTop magically organizes the relevant results (for now, from Twitter) for any user query along a variety of interesting dimensions. A whole new perspective is provided of what users in the individual and in the aggregate are thinking and doing. Perhaps TipTop will help you detect better the “tremor” about a place! I would encourage everyone to give it a spin.
Funny…my cell phone on vibrate gives me all the tremors and vibrations I’ll ever need.
But thanks anyway …
“Funny…my cell phone on vibrate gives me all the tremors and vibrations I’ll ever need.”
Really comical…..
Nice to know there will be more gadgets coming up for twitter, hopes it helps us find information in a short time
I don’t trust any technology powered by Graboids.
…waitaminute…
this comment cracked me up
Can you fit a Graboid in an iPhone. What happens if it escapes while the phone is in your front pocket?