Wowd Blog

A big update from Wowd...

Hello, and thanks for visiting the Wowd blog.

As you probably know, Wowd's focus has been on delivering great newsfeed filtering and ranking services. Our goal has been to give you tools that you can use to find the good stuff in your Facebook newsfeed.

After a great run, the team has decided to pursue new opportunities. We're particularly pleased that some members of our engineering team have plans to join Facebook, where they'll work on a variety of products.

Others here at Wowd are already busy at work on a brand new mobile social search app.

If you'd like to be among the first to know about our forthcoming mobile app, please just leave your email address at www.wowd.com.

Cheers,

Your friends at Wowd.

Wowd Takes to the Web to Cut through Social Network Clutter

 Now you can enjoy the benefits of Wowd on the Web with our new Web version available now!  To get started, just go to www.wowd.com and click Facebook Connect. It’s true – Wowd is now only a mouse click away!

 

We’ve heard the feedback from some of you Wowd fans and decided to provide a Web option in addition to the downloadable client.  This new version focuses exclusively on cutting through the clutter to help you organize your Facebook by surfacing the updates that matter to you most.

Here are some the features you’ll get with the new Wowd Web version:

• Custom Feeds:  See only what you want from your Facebook news feed whether it’s specific people, topics or both.
• SmartFeeds: Automatically see natural groupings of Facebook friends, like your family, colleagues and more.
• Social Search Inside Facebook:  Search for any topic in your Facebook news feed.
• Conversation Summaries:  See at a glance what your friends are talking about.
• Plus!  Update your status, comment on posts, ‘like’ items, and browse your social graph.

 

There are a few features that are still exclusive to the downloadable client, including:

 

• Private Web History:  Easily find any Web page you’ve visited.
• SearchStream:  Your Web searches update live in real time.
• Hot Topics:  See a summary of what’s popular on the Web by category.

 

The Wowd team looks forward to your feedback and we try to incorporate it as much as possible when updating our features.  Stay tuned for new features on both the Web version and downloadable client in early 2011.  Until then, tell us what you think about Wowd on the Web. What other features would you like to see?

 

 

Wowd helps you organize your Facebook experience with SmartFeeds -- New Feature Available!

If you’re having a hard time keeping track of what your friends are saying on Facebook, then we have great news.  Starting today, Wowd is introducing a new feature called SmartFeeds.  SmartFeeds automatically finds natural groupings of friends and creates customized views of your Facebook news feed that let you instantly see what these groups of friends are talking about on Facebook.

The new SmartFeeds feature is helpful because it automatically analyzes your Facebook account, figures out who is related to whom and what natural groups exist, and then creates SmartFeed views of your Facebook news feed.  The SmartFeed views let you easily see what different groups of your friends are talking about and lets you finally get your social information overload under control.

When I ran the SmartFeed feature over my own Facebook account, it helpfully found some interesting groups of friends and colleagues right away.  For example, I used to work in Artificial Intelligence and software at NASA, and Wowd’s SmartFeeds found a group of my friends from both the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and NASA’s Ames Research Center. 

With one click on the new SmartFeed, I was able to see what those friends were talking about.  SmartFeeds automatically created a title for the new feed, which in this case used the names of three friends from the list.  You can choose to leave the title alone, or edit it to reflect how you know this group of people came about.  In this case, I renamed the new SmartFeed to be “NASA friends”.

Wowd’s SmartFeed feature also found all my family members from Facebook… my sisters, cousins, my mother, and even my aunt!  Two clicks later, and that SmartFeed was called “Family”, and now it’s really easy for me to keep up with what’s going on in their lives.  It’s definitely a time-saver.  It was also great to have the SmartFeed constructed automatically -- I didn’t have to laboriously go through a long list of names, picking out only those people who are family members.

Personally, I find the new SmartFeed feature particularly helpful in the context of Wowd’s ability to summarize conversations.  For some time now, Wowd has delivered a summary of topics in any feed you select.  We call this the “Hot Topics” for a feed. 

You get a Hot Topics summary for all feeds that exist inside Wowd, so of course you get Hot Topics for a SmartFeed, too.  This means that when I click on the NASA friends SmartFeed, I see the list of posts, updates, comments, etc. from those friends, but I also see a nice compact display of the topics that summarize the conversation.  Each of the topics is a clickable link, so with a single click on any interesting topic, I can find all the posts, updates, etc. that mention that topic. 

This has really transformed how I use Facebook.  I use my SmartFeeds to pick out specific groups of people, I use Hot Topics to figure out what they’re talking about, and then use Wowd’s social search to dig in deeper, to explore specific topics.  It really is an awesome experience, and I encourage you to download the Wowd client to try it out for yourself.  Please also share your feedback with us on Twitter, @Wowd.

With this new feature, we hope Wowd will be even more helpful to you when it comes to organizing your online social life and cutting through social networking clutter. 

Stay tuned for more updates and exciting new features in the coming weeks!  We're working on some really powerful features, and will be talking more about them soon.

To read more click here, or check out this excellent Techcrunch article by Erick Schoenfeld about SmartFeeds.

 

Facebook groups & custom feeds -- cutting through social clutter

Hey, check out our latest column at Search Engine Watch, "How to Cut Through Social Media Clutter".

Are you getting too many updates in Facebook?  Are you overwhelmed by updates on topics you really don't care about?

And do you feel that you're missing updates from people that you do care about, on topics that are important to you?

Facebook can be an incredibly valuable source of social information, and with Wowd's custom feeds to filter and rank it all, you can actually have a good time (again), in your on-line social life.

Try Wowd today, and be sure to send us your feature suggestions and ideas for how Wowd can help manage social clutter.  We live and work to help you find the very best stuff from your social networks!

 

 

 

 

Awesome search panel at Stanford University, Wed 9/22

A quick heads-up on an awesome search-related event next week...

"Search 3.0: Real-Time Search & Social Search", in the evening, on Wednesday, September 22, at Stanford University.

Details and registration info are available here. 

Bill York, VP of Engineering and Operations here at Wowd, is speaking.  If you haven't heard Bill speak before, then you've missed out, and this is your chance.

I'm told that tickets are going fast, so if you want to get one, I recommend signing up now.

If you care about search, social search, real-time search, and want to know what's happening and where it's all going, this is the event for you.

Wowd's real-time discovery and search -- now available for Facebook

We're delighted to announce the general availability of Wowd 4.0.  You can get it today, from the Wowd website.

This new version of Wowd takes our existing real-time discovery, summary, and search capabilities, and makes them available inside Facebook.

Using Wowd, you can view your Facebook data without "game spam", you can define a list of favorite friends, and also easily create "standing" real-time searches based on a combination of people and topics. 

The benefits to you are that you don't have to suffer through endless updates and other information that you don't want to see, and you're able to find information from people that you do care about, on topics that you care about.

You might ask yourself, why is this a client application?  Why do I have to install some software on my own computer?

One benefit to you is that your Facebook account data stays on your own computer (and with Facebook, of course).  You're not sharing that data with a third party.  Given existing privacy concerns and considerations around Facebook data, we thought that it would be a good idea to keep your Facebook data in a place that you directly control.

Try Wowd for Facebook today, and let us know what you think.

A better approach to privacy

Back in February of 2010, we wrote up a short post in this blog about Wowd's approach to the management of private information (http://blog.wowd.com/wowd_blog/2010/02/forbes-on-wowd.html).

A person commented on that blog post and suggested that we explain how this works, in a bit more detail.

So we've finally written a Wowd white paper on privacy, called "A new approach to improving privacy on the web", and it's available here: http://wowd.com/publications/WowdPrivacy.pdf .

This white paper and all other Wowd white papers are available from the Wowd web site: http://www.wowd.com/white-papers.jsp .

Wowd covered on ABC News

Wowd was covered by ABC news recently.  Video available here: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/assignment_7&id=7502730 .

Trending topics in real-time

Do you like the way that Twitter offers a list of trending topics?

Would you like to be able to track the topics that are trending in real-time, against any search term that you care about?

Check out our recent column at Search Engine Watch to see how you can do this.  It's easy, valuable, and fun.

Wowd 3.0 - What Interests You?

I am happy to introduce Wowd 3.0, the latest release of our real-time discovery and search product. You can try the web version or download the free full version at wowd.com

By far the biggest new feature in Release 3.0 is the addition of content categories to both Hot Lists and Search Results. The UI now sports a prominent "Category Bar" at the top of the page:

The bar shows 10 different category names, plus "All". When a user clicks on a category name, the contents of the page are filtered so that only web pages matching the selected category are shown. This provides an immediate way for Wowd users to "customize" Wowd content, to zoom in on topics that are of interest to them. The category labels include Business, Deals, Entertainment, Gaming, Health, News, Politics, Science, Sports and Technology.

 Want to know the latest developments in basketball or baseball? Just click on "Sports". Are you a gadget hound? "Technology" is where you want to start. And as Wowd presents the Hot List for your category, the Topic Tag Cloud will be updated to show you the hot topics contained in the pages in that list.

Categories can also be used to filter search results. This can be very useful for narrowing a result set down to the subset that you care about. For an extreme example, consider the many meanings of the search term "armageddon". In Entertainment, it refers to movies, video games and the works of Kurt Vonnegut. 

 
 

In Business it means financial trouble:

 

And in Sports it's all about wrestling:

Combining clicks on category names with clicks on items in the topic tag cloud is a great way to experience how Wowd can help you browse through the vastness that is the World Wide Web and find something you really like.

So come try out Wowd 3.0 at wowd.com