People say everything bad you post online will be found when you grow up – but what if you could use help finding the good things you’ve posted to the web? Startup company Vizify believes there’s a need for that and the company’s first product, called Tweetsheet, is already showing me things about my use of Twitter that I didn’t know before. Here’s my profile page there.
Log in with your Twitter credentials and the service will show you what your most popular Tweets have been, how your Tweeting has grown or fallen over the past year, who retweets and replies to you the most and where the people who respond to you live. All this data is pretty straightforward but it’s presented well and is a good example of the company’s big vision: to help people surface their best historical content to present that to the world.
What did I learn from my TweetSheet profile? I found out that my activity spiked in June and hasn’t ever recovered since – thanks to Google Plus. I got a good picture of what the most popular content I share is – it tends to be news coverage of big brand name web apps. Unfortunately it’s tweets with the strongest language, the most audacious claims, that get retweeted the most from my account, too. I also learned that Portland coder Jeremy Felt really appreciates my twitter posts. That’s great.
There’s much more that could be surfaced just on Twitter – not to mention once the service expands out to more services. Todd Silverstein, CEO of the company, says that users will be able to use the surfaced data visualizations to edit together public profiles they could share with others.
“I began my career in publishing,” he says, “and there has always been a lot of ephemera published, much of it that deserves to be saved. I kept a journal when I was younger and I think it’s great to see where I was in my life at those times. I believe there is a lot of content in Twitter that deserves to be saved, too. But we don’t have the tools to understand it.”
Silverstein comes from Cornell, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, HarperCollins books, co-founded online custom jewelry startup Gemkitty and in 2009 was awarded a patent on a practice called Remote Purchasing that sounds like part of the Bruce Sterling short story Maneki Neko.
Silverstein says that despite the site’s simple looks, he’s got meaningful patents filed. “Acquiring that information, going through it and finding interesting things,” he says, “we’re doing it algorithmically, working backwards from an inspection of data, in the future new data we’re not yet familiar with – and that’s a non-trivial matter.”
Algorithms applied to real-time social software user data, in service of self-awareness and effective presentation. That sounds great, we’ll see what more Vizify can deliver.