As social media activity becomes an increasing portion of companies' marketing focus, including finding new clients and tracking company brands or product mentions across the Web, a virtual industry of reputation and analytics firms have sprung up to try and derive value from the noise. A simple application called Abuzz just hit the iTunes store with a goal of making these social media searches simple and mobile. The result is a lightweight client that tracks keywords across multiple outlets and even lets you respond to mentions from within the application.


Abuzz Lets You Set Campaigns and Keywords to Track
Abuzz's interface is very easy to grasp. Start by creating a new campaign (such as a brand name or product), add keywords to that campaign, and choose what communities to monitor. Abuzz comes standard with the ability to search blogs, Digg, forums and Twitter, and you can select to not search any of those communities if you believe they do not drive value.


Select Where to Search and Abuzz Delivers Results
Rather than passively watching the updates stream by, you can click through to any of them, including blog posts, which are displayed within Abuzz, without having to open Safari and exiting the app. Similarly, selecting relevant Tweets puts you into a Twitter stream of sorts. If you have entered your Twitter login information, you can respond to mentions, retweet activity with a single click, tag the content for later viewing, or even e-mail it to an interested party.


Abuzz Even Tracks Twitter Mentions and Messages
While Abuzz isn't trying to replace Tweetie or whatever your favorite Twitter client is on the iPhone, its integrated client is good enough for most tasks. It knows, once you have registered, how to easily discover your mentions on the service, and brings your direct messages to the fore for easy viewing.


Take Action on Tweets From Within Abuzz
The goal of Abuzz is to let you monitor social media sites with saved searches at any time from your iPhone. Today's Twitter clients tend to be heavy on the updating and light on the searching, but Abuzz makes the process all about finding relevant content and keeping it easily accessible. As you can see from my example screenshots, Abuzz makes it easy to track clients or recent companies I have written about to watch for impact. The application is authored by Shawn Farner, who details the app as "social search, plain and simple". You can find Abuzz here.

Disclosure: The application is $2.99 on iTunes. Shawn passed me a free code to review.

It seems a bit redundant to talk about how much the Web has impacted my life and the way we communicate on a blog, but with the advent of the World Wide Web's recent 20th anniversary, I took some time last week to speak with Stu Miniman of EMC about how the Web has broken down barriers that were traditionally limited by geography or class, and how we as a society are increasingly turning to the Web first for news, business and entertainment. It can be tempting to pull out a crystal ball and project our own desires as to what the Web will look like 20 years from now, in 2030, but I know that any specifics I give would just be wrong, as they were for most guesses back in 1990.

What I do believe will happen is that as the components of the Web improve, from processors to networking and storage, so to will the Web's potential continue to grow. We will see further crumbling of barriers, and gain the ability to have shared experiences that may involve more senses than just sight and sound, which are predominant today.

Stu posted the discussions, as a correlation to ON Magazine, EMC's thought leadership magazine, on his blog earlier today, and you can find that, as well as comments from Hutch Carpenter, here: Celebrating the Web at 20. I have included the CinchCast of our call below, and you can read the full transcription on this page: The Web 2030:

Last April, Twazzup looked to make searching Twitter a more rich experience, one-upping the vanilla Twitter search interface by adding graphics, real-time updates, and influencers of individual accounts, to name a few most obvious improvements. Now, the company looks to be on the verge of shifting gears in an aggressive way, developing not yet another search engine, but instead, a feature-rich Web client for Twitter that looks within the real-time content stream to find different types of updates, and even goes so far as to expand links shared on Twitter, providing followers with a preview of that which you have shared. The result is easily the most compelling Twitter Web experience I have seen since Brizzly, even if it is not yet known when the service will open up to all, or what it means for the company's current search offering.


Twazzup Breaks Out Content by Type, Displays Rich Media, Integrates Search
With Twitter's maturation, the service has recently adopted a number of new features, including the much-discussed Lists, addition of geolocation, and integrated retweeting. These additions have led to greater functionality by practically all clients, but few have looked to take the next step, not only integrating the new options, but presenting a new approach to the real-time streams. Brizzly was among the first to debut in-line display of video and images. Twazzup does this also, but in addition, expands links to provide previews of content, like you see on Facebook, and the automated categorization of content by its type, a sentiment analysis of updates, and an associated tag cloud, velocity of updates, and the ability to take action on updates, such as favorites, retweets, or replies in a single click.


Viewing a list shows sentiment analysis and a content cloud
To be honest, the more I played with the beta functionality of the new Twazzup, the more features I uncovered. While not completely baked, it is easily the most feature-rich Web client out there, and when it does debut, it should see people kicking the tires in a big way.

Today, Twitter's standard Web client is functional, if not exciting. You have the familiar "What's happening?" box and a series of updates from those you follow, as well as your own personal statistics on the right. Twazzup focuses less on your own numbers, but those from your stream.


Note the velocity in the top right and new updates on Twazzup


Mentions on Twazzup also show tags, sentiment, who shared the content.
In addition to a simple "Post Update" button, Twazzup's client shows the total number of recent updates from those in my stream in the last hour, selects "Highlights", which includes those I talk to most often, influencers and popular shared links, "Photos and Video" for shares that display rich media, "Questions" for those updates that have questions, and "Map", which highlights updates that feature geolocation, complete with avatars from those Tweeters.


Check Out Twazzup's Map for Where Tweets Originate


Retweets, replies and favorites in line on Twazzup.
The velocity of the tweets can vary from time of day, of course. In my testing, it looked like the nearly 10,000 people I follow were tweeting at a velocity between 6,000 and 15,000 updates a day, on a quiet Sunday. No doubt a weekday, or a big news day, would see higher numbers. Given the high numbers, it can sometimes be hard to find the most relevant data. Twazzup dices these updates with its powerful search roots. A "Refine" search box on the right shows only those tweets in my stream that match keywords, and the search term is highlighted in results.


Searching for a frequent term in the stream on Twazzup
One of Twazzup's big features is a minimalist navigation bar atop the screen, which shows lists you follow, mentions, and an Inbox (where direct messages come and go). On the right side, you also have a "Settings" box which lets you choose what contributes to your "Highlights" on the page. It's much like the right navigation bar on the Twitter page, but the only numbers that populate it are those of how many mentions you have seen, how many new messages are in your in box, or how many new items are on your home stream.


I can choose my Highlights from Twazzup.
In place of the right side navigation, you get details on your stream, from a tag cloud based on included keywords, with larger words being used most frequently, and a smiley face to indicate positive feedback, or frown to indicate negative mood.

Twazzup's new Twitter client shows significant potential, especially when compared to Twitter.com and Brizzly, but it doesn't yet offer some of the more advanced features some clients offer, from what I could tell, including support for Facebook, multiple user support or columns, like Seesmic Web. But it does hint at API integrations, including a connection to LinkedIn, so I will be very interested in seeing what is in store for the very newest of Twitter Web clients. I don't yet have information on when the service will open up, or what this means for Twazzup's current search offering, but there will soon be a new name in town when it comes to Web interfaces for Twitter, and that name is Twazzup.

Guest Post by Chris Saad (@chrissaad | Blog)
Vice President, Strategy, Echo


I like the Synaptic Web because it's different. Unlike other projects or initiatives I've been involved with, the Synaptic Web is not an open standard, advocacy group or business. It is not even something Khris Loux, Eric Blantz or I invented. It is not even something we are advocating for or developing. It is simply something we observed and wrote down.

We wrote it down because we needed a framework from which to design, develop and refine our own product. We then shared it at SynapticWeb.org because others seemed interested in learning more about it. Since then we have continued to refine it and collect examples of other people taking our observations and expanding upon them. We hope this post is just another step in continuing the discussion here in the comments, and across the Web.

The Synaptic Web is not new. It is not a recent trend. It is something that started before the advent of HTTP and HTML gave birth to the actual Web and will continue long after the boom of 'real-time' fades away. It is a simple observation that the most interesting aspect of the Internet generally and the Web specifically is not the nodes on the network, but the type, density and flexibility of the connection between them.

We use the metaphor of the Synapse (the connection between brain cells) as a way to try to relate this idea to the real world - a literal mental model if you will, and over the years, we've observed these connections have morphed in surprising ways. Nodes have atomized (i.e. nodes are now more granular and there are more of them) and the nature of the connections are changing at an accelerating rate.

This new-found density of nodes and the rapidly changing nature of the connections between them has made the SynapticWeb easier to observe and document, not to mention more important to pay attention to.

What are the nodes?

Nodes used to be computers on the network. They then expanded to include documents on the web. Then pieces of content became nodes in their own right and now, even pieces of data - people, places, photos, videos, status updates, geo data - can be considered self contained single units.

Every single one of these things now has a canonical URI allowing us to uniquely reference them and to connect them together in new and novel ways.

What are the connections?

Connections used to be TCP/IP connections between computers. They then expanded to include hyperlinks between pages, then 'friendships' between people and now include real-time streams between all sorts of objects. Soon the implicit inferences made from those streams will increasingly become visible and viable connections in their own right.

Synaptic Web

Our premise is that while most have observed the changes in the nodes, the more interesting opportunity for innovation is to observe the change in the connections and how those changes might produce new user experiences.

In the age of social media, we asked ourselves 'what objects can become more social'. The result was vertical social networks that focused on these social objects. Obvious examples include Flickr for photos, YouTube for video, MySpace for Music and Facebook for Friends.

The fact of the matter, though, is that being social is only one kind of connection. An interesting and important one, but not the only one.

Links between 'social objects' and people are fantastic but what about the connection between you and your interests, your interests and products, products and ratings, ratings and pricing, pricing and quality, quality and availability?

These type of connections used to be made in private, carefully curated databases. In some cases there were algorithms placed on top to try to make rudimentary recommendations but the connections rarely spanned these closed systems much less allowed for curation at 'Internet Scale'. The connections were too brittle, controlled and insular.

Now, with an abundance of real-time gesture data, the growing trend to map everything to a URI, the availability of semantic technologies, the game like crowd-sourcing of tags and more, these connections are becoming far more rich and interesting.

An example of a great Synaptic application is Microsoft Photosynth.

Its predecessor, Quicktime VR, allowed one user to create a single continuous photo and then allowed viewers to scroll across that image like being inside a kind of 3D sphere.

Instead, Photosynth allows hundreds of people with thousands of photos (atomized nodes) to, acting independently, automatically generate a 3D mesh of the scene they were capturing. The connections between the photos are totally organic. The authors had no idea about this potential application when taking the photo, the photos were not arranged in a special way and the 3D mesh on which they are placed was totally generated by connecting previously disconnected nodes together and looking for the patterns.

Another very visual example is Augmented Reality. Where once we might have looked at the Yellow Pages, which only connected two types of data (zip code + business type) to create a static list of directory entries. Instead, the latest Augmented Reality app can take Location, Orientation, Directory information, Personal Interests and Business Type to layer meta data on the real world through a camera lense (typically a mobile phone).

As you can see by these two examples, just by adding just a few more nodes to the equation, and connecting those nodes more organically, the result is a dramatically different experience.

These are very real, and very current, examples of the synaptic density of the web becoming far more complex and powerful.

Real-time is perhaps the hyped aspect of the Synaptic Web. To me, the 'real-time web' is analogous to Synapsis firing in the brain. The rate, route and repetition of real-time data between nodes (usually people) has introduced countless new user experiences and content discovery opportunities.

Obviously Real-time is is just one way that connections between our nodes are changing and we have yet to scratch the surface on the possibilities.

What's Next

The goal of this post is simply to introduce the idea of the Synaptic Web and highlight the value of paying attention to the connections between nodes. There are countless ways in which this thinking might impact product design, user behavior and business models so it would be impossible to provide exhaustive coverage in one piece.

I encourage you to read the SynapticWeb strawman and continue the conversation in the comments, on your own posts, at conferences and in your own products. Who knows where it might take us!

Conclusion

So in summary, the Synaptic Web is not something that necessarily needs our support or conscious development - it is happening with or without us. It has been happening for a long time and its continuation is inevitable.

People might refer to it as different things, they might focus on various smaller aspects of the broader theme, but in the end the notion is the same - it is the connection between the nodes - and the way they are becoming more dense, more flexible, more implicit, more visible and more open - that is truly exciting and will continue to make an impact on people's lives through the Web.

I can't wait to see where it goes next.

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Learn more about other people's take or to contribute to this theme please check out SynapticWeb.org. You can find Chris Saad at his blog, Paying Attention, and on Twitter. Chris is also Vice President, Strategy at Echo.