Webware

(Credit: Twitter)

Now live, from the team behind Twitter: a site for tracking "tweets" pertaining to the fast-approaching U.S. presidential elections. Enter an election-related post on the page and it will appear in the continually-updating feed, which also aggregates other Twitter posts that contain election-related terms like the candidates' names.

In July, Twitter announced that it had acquired Summize, a popular search tool based on the Twitter application program interface (API). Now called Twitter Search, the Summize technology appears to be behind the filters on the election site.

If the 2004 elections hailed the debut of bloggers and the 2006 mid-term elections were when YouTube popped onto the scene (just ask former Virginia senator George Allen), it's looking like 2008 will be the election cycle where Twitter sped to the forefront of the political Web. The campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain have created Twitter accounts for up-to-the-minute news and updates--the most recent updates are featured at the top of the Twitter election site--and the micro-blogging site has proven to be a must-use tool for opinionated news junkies and aspiring pundits.

But Twitter is still small enough so that it's possible to generate a simple "election feed" without encountering too much noise or irrelevant banter.

Twitter has also partnered with experimental news network Current TV on its election coverage, and selected live "tweets" will be displayed on-screen during its coverage of the presidential debates. Those are slated to start on Friday night, but Republican candidate John McCain's participation is still up in the air due to his announcement that he would suspend his campaign to focus on the ongoing Wall Street calamity.

Will he debate or not? Check that nifty new election page on Twitter. They're talking about it.

On Monday night, social-news site Digg took a new approach to its famously clamorous users: CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose sat down in front of a Ustream-connected camera with their MacBook Pros and a couple of beers and answered questions that had been submitted by Diggers.

As a relative outsider to Digg culture, I was fairly dissatisfied.

All in all, the session highlighted quite a few of Digg's strengths as well as troubles going forward--and additionally reflected a few common criticisms about the site as a whole. But in the process, the questions were inward-focused, dealing with the demands of an active but demanding user base. Very few dealt with Digg's place in the Web's landscape or new media industry as a whole.

Digg, like a handful of other social-media sites (Yelp and Vimeo come to mind), has become famous for a notoriously tight-knit community. On one hand, that's a sign of success. It's got a really dedicated user base. On the other hand, it invokes claims of cliquishness and complaints that it's hard for an outsider to break in.

Watching the town hall, those complaints seemed pretty grounded. Right off the bat, the 20 questions selected were chosen because of the numbers of Diggs each question amassed in a thread about the town hall. True, that's keeping it in the community, and Digg is all about the community. But it's also a bit incestuous, and the questions could have fallen prey to Digg's alleged insideriness--voting up a comment or story simply because of who posted it or submitted it, not because of the content of the stories.

And consequently, the vast majority of the stories were about the nitty-gritty details of the site, the sort of thing that would be of importance to a daily Digg user but which would be inconsequential at best (and potentially nonsensical) to an outsider. I'm not a top Digger, but I'm more than familiar with the site. Digg's users, for better or for worse, also happen to be a tech-savvy bunch. That means a tougher job for Adelson, Rose, and the rest, as the users will be more likely to demand upgrades to the service, insist on a better user experience, and the like. That's good; I'm tired of seeing Web 2.0 sites thinking that they can get away with perpetual beta phases and poor performance.

But on the other hand, Digg can't simply look inward because legitimate competitors have begun to surface. One of them, Mixx, just raised several million dollars in venture funding. None of the questions addressed on Monday night dealt with Digg's opinion of its competitors, plan for moving forward in a tough economic climate, or where Rose and Adelson see the site in five years. Granted, that's not their fault; the questions about "super-users" and comment system upgrades were, after all, what the users Dugg. But I sat through question after question about minute upgrades to the Digg comment system when I really wanted to hear about Adelson and Rose's collective vision for the site going forward.

One question did touch upon the constant gossip that Digg will get acquired. For obvious reasons, Adelson and Rose declined to comment. "We get asked this every day," was Adelson's response. "We are laser focused on the features that users want us to do, and frankly that is what we're focused on as a business right now."

Digg does have a great model for social news that, in my opinion, hasn't yet been paralleled by any other site. But it's in a bit of a Catch-22: ignore or deceive its community, and it faces mass backlash; but pander to its community too much, and it hinders its opportunities for growth as it focuses too far inward. I wanted to hear vision. I wanted to hear partnerships and developments and possibilities. What I heard instead was the gradual upgrading of the search algorithm. Maybe, because I'm not a hardcore Digger, I just don't get it.

But I appreciate that Kevin Rose is a fan of Chimay Red ale.

Here's yet another way to harness the wisdom of the crowd for your personal gain: TrustedOpinion, a recommendation engine that creates product ratings based on reviews that are weighted by the writers' proximity to you in your social network.

My circle of friends: Mostly good taste in movies.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Your friends' opinions carry the most weight. The opinions of their friends (your friends-of-friends) carry less. Your friends-of-friends-of-friends still less, and so on. The thinking being that you're more likely to trust your friends' takes on product reviews than those of people you don't know. If you want, you can control the weightings even more, individually scoring people in your network as an expert (or not) in particular categories.

It may sound confusing, but TrustedOpinion does a very good job of representing the data it's processing. When you're looking at the network's review of a product, you see, in a rotating 3D view, the 1-to-10 ratings your friends gave the product as numbers in close orbit around you (you're at the middle). Their friends are a level out, and so on. TrustedOpinions calls this the Radar Score, and it does a very good job of simplifying data. The system also shows you how your own calculated rating on a product is different from the site-wide average.

One score does not fit all.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The system can also display a list of products ranked on scores, which is a useful tool to see what your friends like best. And you can turn the data around, to find out which of your friends are the best match for your tastes. I could see this function being used in dating services.

At the moment, TrustedOpinion only rates movies. The company, in fact, just announced that it has integrated its service with Netflix. It can extract data from your account to make it easier for you to rate the films you've seen. It doesn't transfer ratings in or out of Netflix, though. This is the start of a useful service--as Netflix doesn't have an API that TrustedOpinion can tap into, the integration is a bit of a hack. But, says TrustedOpinion Co-founder Todd Greene, "We haven't broken terms of use, as far as we can tell."

Categories other than music will likely be added soon.

You can rate your friends' reviewing chops.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I like the way TrustedOpinion blends social network data with user evaluations. However, I strongly feel that TrustedOpinion is more feature than product. In other words, this functionality belongs in Netflix itself, or in Amazon, or Facebook, or maybe even in CNET. Greene says that next year the company will focus on offering the service to other companies, but he maintains that the service can work quite well as a standalone product--he says TrustedOpinion has acquired a quarter million users in a few months, with no advertising or marketing.

If you don't mind building yet another instance of your personal social network, it's worth trying out. If you do mind, wait a few months and hope that the service is indeed integrated into existing networks.

See also: Spout, Flixter, Epinions, and PowerReviews (review).