Improving The Web

About two weeks ago I created a new website: ConvoTrack.com.

This website offers a bookmarklet that, when installed, allows you to see the entire conversation surrounding a particular webpage at the press of a button. Comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, HackerNews and any blog mentioning the article are loaded in a sidebar. This way, you can see comments that were never on the original site.

Additionally, you can send a link with the sidebar preloaded to people who don’t have the bookmarklet installed. Simply prepend “http://convotrack.com/” to any URL to do so.

Site integration

If you’d like to add this functionality to your own website, you can use the code found on ConvoTrack.com. This will add a button on the left side of your website that behaves exactly like the bookmarklet.

If you’re a wordpress user however, you may be interested in the more advanced Backtype Connect wordpress plugin. This plugin allows for a seamless integration of the outside comments in your own comment system.

How was it built?

BackType.com is the service that does all the heavy lifting. Using their newly released BackType connect API the bookmarklet queries for all comments pertaining to a particular URL and then outputs them in the sidebar. Very easy.

What’s coming?

A firefox extension should be released soon, this will allow you to have the sidebar visible at all times and will update the comments as you browse the web.

Suggestions?

If you have any suggestions for improvements, do tell.

Well, it’s time to unveil what kept me away from this blog the past few weeks. The twitter mashup I was talking about is now live and is called TweepleRank.

At the most basic level, it tracks user recommendations made on Twitter. To accomplish that, it tracks a couple of hashtags, namely #followfriday, #mrtweet and #tweepletuesday. If you don’t know these, that doesn’t matter, but basically each of these allows you to recommend other tweeple.

The website is basically a tool to help you find new tweeple to follow. First, you have the top recommended tweeple lists which showcase the top tweeple in specific time periods. For example, here are the results for the first #followfriday. Or how about the top recommended people for the entire year?

A general top list is fine, but I want to be able to search and find recommendations that are personal to me. Luckily, the website allows you to do that as well.

You can search either the tweets themselves, the user bios, or user tags. What are user tags? Well, user tags are any and all hashtags that have been added to the tweet in addition to #followfriday. For example:

#followfriday Check out @improvingtheweb #php #entrepeneur, @jdevalk #wordpress.

Now, I (@improvingtheweb) am associated with the tags “php” and “entrepeneur”. @jdevalk is now associated with “wordpress”.

The great thing is that you can use this website to see the top recommended people for whichever tag you want. The results will be sorted by either the number of recommendations or the number of followers.

For an example, see results for the tag #travel.

If you want to see a full list of tags, simply go to this page.

Finally, one last feature: personalized results.

This allows you to see the top recommendations in your network: made by the people you follow and no one else.

This is interesting because those recommendations are probably much more in tune with your personal interests and can lead to some interesting new tweeple to follow.

That’s about it, I’ve got a few other features that will launch next #followfriday, so stay tuned! If you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments!