Twazzup: Beyond Real-Time Search

When Twazzup was launched in 2009, many referred to it as “one of the most interesting Twitter search engines,” for its way of presentsing search results in an appealing and useful way. One year later, Twazzup is launching Insights, a real-time Twitter analytics service, and Reader, a web-based Twitter client and is still getting a lot of positive reviews.

Twazzup search tool, News, allows you to search any topic in any language. If for example you are interested in finding conversations on Twitter about Starbucks, Twazzup will search it for you and besides showing real time search results and number of tweets/hour on Starbucks, will also show you:

• Highlights (relevant Twitter users/discussions on the coffee brand),

• Community (who are the most influential, the most active and the latest users mentioning Starbucks),

• Most common keywords related to Starbucks (e.g. coffee), most retweeted users and most used hashtags (e.g. #starbucks).

What’s interesting is that by clicking everywhere in the results page you can see a pop up window with more information about a user/keyword/hashtags.

Twazzup also displays real time results on pictures, relevant web news and top links about the topic you searched.

The new Twazzup analytics service, Insights, is still in private alpha testing but some teaser reports made available by Twazzup on their website show the application’s potential. From this page, you can also request a preview account.

Similarly to Twazzup News, Insights allows you to search a specific topic (your product, your company, your competitors) and get insights on who is talking about it and what they have to say. Twazzup will show you top keywords and hashtags related to your search, top influencers, and top links about this topic. But what really differentiates Insights is that it will also give you insights on the activity happening around that topic in the last day, showing:

• Number of participants (and participants per hour)
• Number of tweets and retweets (and retweets per hour)
• Unique links

On top of all this, Twazzup analyzes sentiment and displays the number of positive, neutral and negative tweets.

Twazzup new Social Reader (which is open for everyone to try) is a Web client for Twitter that looks within your real-time content stream and offers all the basic Twitter client features (mentions, direct messages, search, lists, links shortening) plus some interesting extras.

Content can be displayed looking at ALL tweets, or can be filtered so that it shows only suggested highlights (tweets by influential people, people that you interact the most with etc – you can set your own criteria for highlights from the “Settings” button on the right hand corner of your screen), tweets containing videos and photos, tweets asking questions, people active in the last hour and tweets containing links. And Twazzup allows you to run a search within your community’s stream of content and look for a specific keyword/topic.

Reader also shows you:

• Some basic stats on the number of tweets per day in your community and the number of updates and active contacts in the last hours
• A topic cloud with the most popular keywords in your community (you can click on any keyword and you’ll see a content stream)
• A basic sentiment analysis summary that tells you how many good and bad news your contacts are talking about.

Twazzup Reader also expands links shared on Twitter, providing you with a preview of web pages, videos and photos.

All the basic Twitter client features are in the main toolbar, where you have your Home page (the stream of tweets), mentions of you and an inbox with direct messages sent to you. What’s unique for this Twitter client in particular is that all the features available for displaying and managing the stream of tweets (that we’ve just described above) are also available for mentions and direct messages. So for example you can see all messages sent to you or just “highlights”, messages containing photos & videos, or  containing questions. And you can see sentiment analysis, topic clouds, stats etc.

The main toolbar also has a search functionality that you can use to search Twitter for topics/brands/products/news and discover new conversations and users that match your interest and are not part of your community but you can easily follow from within your Twazzup homepage.

Twazzup started as a search engine and became a Twitter client that beautifully integrates analytics, client functionalities and real time search in an easy to use tool that helps you discover conversations, identify influencers, get insights and measure yourself to the competition.

UPDATE (9/14/2010):

Today we reached out to Twazzup asking if they have any comments, recent news, or updated information to add to our posting. They were kind enough to reply back saying since May a lot has happened on their side.

“We’ve shifted the business toward iPad/iPhone applications, and from Twitter centric, to mostly Facebook centric apps. We found the ecosystem around Apple/Facebook a lot healthier for a small startup like us.