This post is part of a new series from HuffPostTech, Socialized, that will profile a different social startup--from apps to services to websites--every day. Want to be featured on the site? Email us about your startup, which should have a social media component and be less than two years old, at bianca@huffingtonpost.com.
Twitter is a terrific way of sharing information in real-time. But what if you wanted to roll back the clock to see the tweets sent during a specific conference, event, or TV show that happened hours, days, weeks, or even months before? TweePlayer offers a way to time travel via Twitter with more accuracy and control than a hashtag. What it is: TweePlayer calls itself a TiVo for Twitter. The service uses an algorithm to intelligently collect and, in a sense, record conversations happening on Twitter at a particular point in time around a defined topic or event.
Much as they would set TiVo to record a TV show, users can schedule TweePlayer to collect tweets related to a specific occurrence, from a presidential debate to basketball game. They can also ask TweePlayer to retroactively curate Twitter posts from an earlier point in time--for example, a day after an Apple press conference, a user could go back and see what was tweeted during the company's announcement.
How it works: Say you missed the Dancing With The Stars finale and, when you finally get around to watching it, you want to follow both the show and the Twitter conversation that occurred during the episode. TweePlayer can help: The site lets users navigate to tweets from a specific event, then presents those Twitter updates in a stream that is synchronized with a video recording of the show or program, if it’s available, on TweePlayer's site (See an example here).
TweePlayer curates the tweets that appear with a given event using an algorithm that relies on hasthags and keywords, among other information, to pick out the most relevant updates.
“We don’t want to barrage people with tens of thousands of tweets,” TweePlayer CEO Mick Darling told HuffPostTech. “An episode of Glee has on average five novels of tweets.”
TweePlayer’s creators also want to enable users to reply to and contribute to the conversation, even though it occurred in the past.
To do this, they have created the option of “[adding] new Tweets to the conversation synchronized to the moments in the show you are watching.” Let’s say you wanted to tweet about an outrageous moment during 30 Rock. Using TweePlayer’s site, you could send a tweet that would appear in the TweePlayer module together with other posts from the same moment during the episode, but the tweet would be posted in real-time to your Twitter feed.
Why you’d use it: Never miss a moment on Twitter again. TweePlayer touts their service as a way to catch conversations around anything from a school board meeting to a college lecture to a conference session. TweePlayer essentially captures a snapshot of what Twitter was talking about in a set point in time. Keep in mind however that the tweets that appear on the site are culled from all over the Twittersphere--and not only from the people you follow--so not all the opinions may be relevant to you.
How to get it: Just visit TweePlayer.com. No Twitter account is needed to get started.
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