Lior Levin's Thoughts

The Twitter Nostalgia App

You know the feeling when you go through an old diary you wrote, or old pictures of your self?

You know this feeling of remembering your self back then, your thoughts, maybe the way you viewed the world?

Nostalgia is fun almost for everyone. My idea is to make a twitter nostalgia app. Since we update so much on twitter and have tweets we wrote from a while back it could be fun to see old tweets you wrote from time to time.

Here is how it would work:

1. a user subscribe to the app and defines if he wants to get old tweets with links, replies or not and so on.

2. Then he starts receiving everyday a random tweet (he posted) from the past.

3. If the user wants to share this old tweet with his friends he needs to send them a link to the app page, where they will see the tweet and have the option to register them selves for the app. This whole process makes the app viral.

Still not sure it’s fun to look at old tweets you wrote from time to time? try this search on google and replace my twitter URL with yours: http://cli.gs/J7nqrs

Since I have no time to do anymore projects, if someone likes the idea and wants to do it- go ahead, I would love to see it.

“Who Better To Go For a Search Than Your Friends”

Says Charlie Rose on a conversation with Michael Arrington: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/24/arrington-on-charlie-rose-talks-twittergate-crunchpad-and-competition/

Updates About Status Search

Louis Gray did a very nice write up about Status Search and I wanted to take advantage of it and add some information he did not include in his blog post.

So yeah we were focusing only on status updates until we figured out that there is a lot of important and valuable information in all the other kinds of content your friends share (video, links, pictures). Also if you think about it, all of those types of content are actually just a status update with a link (to a web page, facebook picture or a facebook video).

Anyway we are happy to announce that today we added the ability to search inside your friends photos, links and videos. So we’re not only status updates any more.

Louis also mentioned FriendFeed and said that the site already lets him search his social graph. But my guess is that it lets him search in his “techy” social graph. FriendFeed lets you search only your friends that are registered to the website.

In Status Search you are able to search all your friends on facebook which probably includes your family, childhood friends, non techies friends and so on. Types of people you probably would not find on FriendFeed.

So to sum it up:

1. We’re not only a status updates search engine any more, but everything your facebook and twitter friends share. I think that’s the way a social graph search engine should be like.
2. FriendFeed social graph search engine is really limited. In Status Search you reach basically everyone you know (thanks to the powerful social graph of Facebook).

History Lesson: The First 5 Users On Facebook

The method for finding out who was the first 5 was simply to play with the id in the URL. You can see that Mark has id=4. 1,2,3 do not exist. The next 2 after Mark are his official co-founders.

Arie, id 7, is the first one who is not a co-founder (officially) . Which makes him actually the first user on Facebook. He’s a Jewish guy that studied with Mark in Harvard and later on did Aliyah to Israel. Last but not least is Marcel who seem to still be working on facebook as a developer.

1. Mark Zuckerberg: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4

2. Chris Hughes http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=5

3. Dustin Moskovitz: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6

4. Arie Hasit: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7

5. Marcel Georgés Laverdet II: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=10

Real Life Search

Have you ever thought how search works in real life (offline I mean. Not on the web)?

It all starts when you want to know something. It happens many times a day. So what do you do? how do you find information about the thing you want to know right now?

Give it a few seconds of thought and you’ll discover that the first thing you do in real life search is go check with your social network. This could be your friends, colleges, family, neighbors and just random people you know and are connected to.

This is the basic philosophy behind Status Search.

Your friends (still) can give you a lot of information that google and twitter can’t. Today, just recently, it’s possible to search in your friends and we hope you’ll like what we have created.

Why Status Search Might Work

I read this article on search engine land and it described few points that show why social search (or search in your friends’ status updates) is the next iteration of search.

I would like to quote few interesting parts of this article:

“
To make important decisions, people tend to turn to people they trust. The conventional search engines do a poor job of providing recommendations from trusted sources. Google and the other engines are good at helping consumers find a chiropractor in their neighborhood, but what about finding a chiropractor your friends use and like?
”

Why social search could have a very good business model.

“
If marketers know what people are thinking and looking for, their ads will be more targeted and annoy fewer non-prospects. This could lead to better results and stronger ROI from marketing efforts.
”

Will google buy new social search technologies?

“
Google is at a delicate moment in its life cycle and must innovate to keep ahead. They’ll need to think about changes to the search scene carefully. Will there be an acquisition?
”

why searching in your friends updates has it’s advantages

“
The likelihood that people trust their own networks is only rising as technology is developed to take old, largely offline word-of-mouth processes and accelerate them with increasingly well-tuned social network intelligence engines.
”

why social search might have better influence over buying decisions

“
Research shows, in any case, that consumers are looking to tap into real, trusted, peer recommendations on products and services across the board, from a stick of gum to an expensive piece of business software. Indeed, it’s these kinds of sources that drive buying decisions.
”

12 Things I Wouldn’t Want To Search In Real Time

1. Recipes

2. Recommendations for good cameras

3. Lovely vacation places

4. Quality books to read

5. Restaurants that got good reviews from my friends

6. Good airline company

7. The wikipedia page of Sergey Brin.

8. The website of a coffee shop I have a meeting in

9. Nike’s website

10. SAT study material

11. What my friends said about a specific apple product

12. Information about ancient animals.

only thing I would like to search in such real time search engines like twitter is news. Everything regarding news I would prefer searching in such search engines.

News has always been a buzz generator and everyone likes to talk about the news. That’s the reason, so I think, that real time search have been buzzing too much lately.