trendpreneur

It’s every CEO’s nightmare: waking up to find mails and tweets pointing out a new competitor, someone who — at first glance — appears to have pipped you to a particularly juicy post. Thus began my morning when I was alerted to Twendz, a new sentiment-based Twitter monitoring app.

However, I actually think Twendz is a good sign. To be boisterously arrogant, the app itself doesn’t hope to compete with what I’m working on in terms of technology, as it’s using the most naive of sentiment classification techniques. (OK, so it could incorporate more advanced classification, which might get worrying.) It also doesn’t really show any useful information — sure, you can get a barometer based on the last three hours or so, and there’s a jolly pretty waterfall of tweets, and the tag cloud is a nice touch, but beyond that? It’s candy, not something you can sit and digest and act on.

The fact it’s been launched by a PR firm is nothing but good, though. It’s a clear sign that at least one firm acknowledges the value of sentiment and opinions in social media, and sees a need for better ways to search and track them. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of press the app gets and it’s certainly alerted me to something that was hit home quite squarely yesterday: think small, not monolithic, release early, and see what happens. If I’d coded this up months ago, which I certainly could have done, who’d be getting the press now? Lesson learned.