Flaptor » News

Twist shows monthly and historical Twitter trends

dbasch — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:03:42 +0000

We have been keeping track of the public Twitter timeline for a few months now. Until a few days all Twist showed was a 7-day window, but now you can select monthly and historical trends. For example, it seems that in late April people start talking more about the summer than about the spring:

Also, you can see weekly patterns. Check out how weekend is mentioned more around Labor Day Weekend.

Stay tuned for more updates. As always, any feedback is welcome!

Positive comments about Twist on Delicious

dbasch — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:08:52 +0000

Twist got a lot of traffic today, as it made it to the top of del.icio.us/popular. Here are very positive comments from del.icio.us users. It’s fun to look at the logs and see what people are comparing. Also, moving it to Amazon EC2 was a good idea as the traffic is not a problem at all.

Flaptor autotagger

dbasch — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:27:24 +0000

We just put up a beta version of our autotagging software at tagger.flaptor.com. It is a program that uses machine learning techniques to guess what tags could apply to a blog post or a news article. Please give it a try and tell us what you think!

Some interesting facts about it:

The current algorithm learned from hundreds of thousands of blog posts from different rss feeds, all of them in English. We plan to support other languages soon.
It is slightly biased towards current events, as most posts are from the past few weeks.
If you click on a suggested tag, you will see information regarding what words in the post contributed to that tag. This gives you a hint as to what search engines may think of your post based on the words it contains.

We are very excited about this tool and we will continue to improve it in the near future so stay tuned!

Fon

dbasch — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:58:47 +0000

This morning I was in a meeting with a number of entrepreneurs including Martin Varsavsky from Fon. He gave a nice presentation about the concept. I got a Fonera (FON’s wifi router) at the from the meeting, which we promptly set up at Flaptor’s office. It’s a neat concept, I won’t explain it here in detail as you can read all about it on the site. Essentially, sharing some of your bandwidth allows you to use Fon’s worldwide network for free. In order for something like this to take off it needs a significant critical mass, obviously there needs to be an abundance of FON access points in major cities. Martin showed some charts that make it look like it could happen in 2007, and it sure helps to have strategic partners like Google and Skype. I’ll keep my eye on it, and will look up FON access points when I travel.

Bonoki

dbasch — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 18:59:24 +0000

Flaptor is mostly about search but sometimes people want to do other stuff. I read once (I believe it was on Peopleware) that when people feel passionately about a project, it’s usually a bad idea to stop them. This is how Bonoki was born. Mono, Rafa, Pancho and Pasto have been working on it for the past quarter. If nothing else, it was a good playground to learn some user interface technologies, perhaps it will become something more. For now, it’s a good place to post and comment on each others’ pictures. It’s still getting started although we refuse to put a Beta logo on it (that’s so 2005!).

Check it out, all feedback (however harsh) is welcome!