Tweetzup + YouTube = Serendipitous Searchless Discovery

This summer, we expanded the reach of Tweetzup results (correlated clusters of emerging topics from Twitter) by plugging in a dynamic YouTube search result driven by the user’s interest. As a result, we have discovered that our users now access YouTube videos based on the awareness of movement from tweets. This makes it more focused and provides entertaining ways to find popular or recently posted videos. With Tweetzup, the user does not need to subscribe to YouTube channels and is limited to only those videos. Instead, users can now choose their topics of interest, see if they are chirping as an indication of something happening, and then be exposed to any contextual video without searching.

Tweetzup also allows its users to set alerts when a theme is showing some movement from their followed topics. This also makes it easy not to be glued to the screen to see what’s up. The system lets you know via email, or you can automatically tweet the alert to your community. This is what I do on my Twitter account @thierryhubert.

For instance, this morning, the system tweeted the alert on my behalf with the following message: “DISRUPT is Emerging on the STARTUP #TweetzUp report http://tweetzup.com/startup?interval=15034636&term=disrupt …”. Clearly, I follow tweetzup’s STARTUP, and I set an alert a few months ago on the term DISRUPT. I clicked on the link and saw the following:



Right away, the system highlighted in orange the correlated keywords associated with DISRUPT showed the tweets, and displayed the most recent videos posted this morning as the TechCrunch Disrupt event in San Francisco was occurring. I would have waited for a late Google alert, depended on my social network friends, or spent too much time searching Google/YouTube and other news/blog aggregates to achieve this result. Crucially, it would not have been on one page that also allowed me to see other emerging terms co-occurring about the theme STARTUP.

About that serendipitous searchless discovery? Being exposed to my topics of interest when something is going on is very fertile ground for serendipitous opportunities. In this case, I discovered a cool application presented at Startup Alley at Tech Crunch that offers a strategic angle for our business. This is what I call serendipitous business intelligence.