Wowd Blog

It's Time to Cut The Social Clutter

Social media is meant to connect people and each of the many available social platforms connects you to various groups in slightly different ways. Facebook began as a platform for college students and has now been fully embraced by more than 500 million people of all ages for keeping in touch, photo-sharing and more.  Twitter encourages you to keep it short and sweet and lets you share thoughts and information with friends, colleagues and complete strangers. And trusty LinkedIn lets you network, job search, connect to colleagues, and generally maintain professional relationships (we’ll stop at these main three, otherwise this blog post will become the never-ending story.)

 

Most likely, you are being constantly bombarded by social media invitations, updates, social gaming spam and more, and this digital noise can begin to crowd your social world and make social media a burden rather than a benefit. Many people even have multiple platforms to manage, so with the plethora of ways to be social online today, there is a serious need for social filters that can cut through the digital clutter. As these platforms evolve, they are constantly trying to find ways to simplify your social experience and there are some helpful tools out there that do a pretty good job of this, and yes Wowd is one of them.  J

 

This week, Facebook unveiled its new “Modern Messaging System.” The new feature integrates Facebook chat, SMS and email into a single inbox. The newly improved Facebook Messages will be initially accessed by a small group of beta testers and over the next few months, Facebook’s 500+ million users will be given access to the new system. All of your messages, whether instant or SMS, will be kept in one “social inbox” where all conversation history will be saved, so you can stroll down your social memory lane whenever you like.  Users can access this inbox with their own email address or through a Facebook email address.

 

It appears that Facebook is working towards simplifying your social experience and cutting through the social clutter in your inboxes by filtering your social messages. Instead of losing your Facebook updates in your email inbox, all your information will be filtered into one unique social inbox. At the press conference, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "It seems wrong that an e-mail message from your best friend gets sandwiched between a bill and a bank statement. It's not that those other messages aren't important, but one of them is more meaningful. With new Messages, your inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into other folders where you can look at them separately."

 

Facebook’s new “Modern Messaging System” seems like a step in the right direction. It’s about time we cut the clutter! What do you think of Facebook’s new messaging feature?  Does it solve a problem that you’ve got?

 

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!

 

 

 

 

Search Engine Watch article -- The Circles of Search

There's been a lot of talk lately about "social search". 

In this month's Search Engine Watch column, I argue that all (useful, interesting) search is social search.

You can see the column here: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641336

 

Who owns the social graph?

In a Search Engine Watch post today, I take John Battelle's question, "Who owns the social graph?", and use that to explore what it means to have API-based access to a social graph, and what this implies for graph ownership and control.

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.

Using search to make product-purchase decisions

So we've now got reference search and real-time search, and we've also got at least a couple of flavors of question-asking sites out there.

How can you use these tools to make an intelligent decision regarding a product you might want to buy?

For some ideas, check out our most recent Search Engine Watch column, "Searching For the Perfect Purchase Process in Social Media, Real-Time Search".

Wowd is cool? We knew that... :)

Wowd is listed as one of "5 Cool Start-Ups to Keep an Eye On" by ABC News.

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 .

Search Engine Watch article on real social ranking

If you're interested in what's coming in "social search", check out our Search Engine Watch column, published today: http://searchenginewatch.com/3640756 .