Todd & I traveled down to NYC this week to attend Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference (#140conf on Twitter) and show off ChatterBox. We manned a table in the exhibitors’ area and were fortunate to chat with many of the attendees as they circulated around the venue. As is usually the case when attending a Twitter-focused event, we met a diverse set of people from a variety of different industries. The common theme among them was that they were passionate about social networking and excited to learn about innovative new apps like ChatterBox.
Some memorable moments from our trip included:
- Dragging a bag full of ChatterBox monkeys through the streets of Manhattan. Some companies might have opted to ship their conference giveaways to the venue, but we self-funded ventures think differently. (Note- the XL L.L. Bean Rolling Adventure Duffle makes an excellent monkey transportation device)
- Giving up the chair from our demo table for use by Ann Curry. We didn’t actually hand her the chair, but I think we should still get credit for the gesture. Watch this video and you’ll see our chair being put to good use!
- Todd being interviewed by BBC Radio Five Live on how Twitter is impacting the situation in Iran. You can listen to the interview by clicking this link (slide the track to around the 21 minute mark).
- Todd being interviewed for Wednesday evening’s episode of CNBC’s Fast Money. Unfortunately his interview did not make the cut, but we acted as extras in a couple of the clips and the ChatterBox signage did make the air.
- Getting to demo ChatterBox for a variety of influential Twitterers, including Chris Brogan & Clayton Morris.
- Having a lively conversation with the world’s fastest talking female, @francapo. She just might be a perfect spokesperson for ChatterBox one day!
Here’s a quick recap of the show in slideshow form:
-Chad
Posted by: Chad Northrup | June 19, 2009 | | categories: ChatterBox Info | tags: #140conf, 140 Characters, @chatterboxapp, ChatterBox, conference, Jeff Pulver, Social Media
So, ChatterBox has been in private beta now for three weeks and things are rolling along nicely. We’ve been learning a lot since the launch to our beta users. So far the feedback has been very positive and we have been lucky to be able to attend some great events.
After our initial launch at the 140 Twitter Conference (#140tc), we were invited to attend Mass Innovation Nights. A huge thanks to Bobbie Carlton for organizing such a great event and for giving us the opportunity to participate. All I can say is that I am never going anywhere without a few ChatterBox monkeys. People love screaming monkeys. If you create a ChatterBox for the #MIN3 hash tag and the word monkey, you’ll see what I mean. I think I might need to invest in the Super Fly Monkey company!
As with all initial releases, there are some things that we need to improve in the application. I thought it might be useful to share some of these items. We’re working on planning the next release now. Aside from addressing some of the general usability items from this release (and some exciting enhancements), we want to make sure that your feedback is included. So, please send us anything you can think of and we’ll start to factor it in to our plans.
So, here’s the list of things we have found so far:
1. Expect a lot more data than you think!
So, believe or not, there happens to be quite of bit of content on Twitter. During 140tc, we opened up private beta invites for 24 hours and got about 70 users signing up to use the app. After 24 hours we found that about 10% of the users on the system had already accounted for 1.2 million conversations pulled-in from Twitter. Now for some that may not seem like much, but for us those numbers made us a little concerned. We want to have quite a few users on the system and to scale up to that amount of capacity over a short period of time will pose a challenge for us self-funded start-ups. So, we decided to make a couple of changes to the application. The first change was to put in a limit for the number of conversations a ChatterBox will pull in for that day. This helps by limiting content for very broad ChatterBoxes that may not be in use regularly. We also added an option to restart the ChatterBox conversation collection if needed.
Personally, I don’t think this solution is optimal. We’ll be improving this over the next release to give you a more “live” feel to the information and to try to take out limitations like this one from the system.
2. The workflow isn’t working out exactly as planned
We love the fact that when a conversation comes in to a ChatterBox, it’s easy to put that conversation into workflow and categorize and tag, prioritize and assign those conversations to other ChatterBox participants. The UI makes it easy to get to the conversations, respond and then update them with additional information. However, it’s not so easy to see which items you have already reviewed and also which items have been updated since you last looked at that ChatterBox. While we have a number in the ChatterBox tab for “untouched” conversations, 
it’s not all that clear what that number means. Also, in looking at the conversations, it’s not blatantly obvious which items have been updated since we present the conversations in a collapsed view. Notifications fall into the same camp. We underestimated the value of email notifications. That’s quickly become the #1 piece of feedback on our UserVoice forum. So, RSS is great, but email is better for notifications. We’ll get that addressed.
3. It’s a team app with a limited sense of team
One of the main ChatterBox features we’re proud of is the ability to collaborate with other members of a team in the management of conversations. It’s a powerful capability that let’s teams see the full trail of conversations and respond easily from a single account (or individual accounts if desired). One problem. You can’t really tell who is participating with you in the ChatterBox. If you are the admin of the ChatterBox, you can see who you have invited and who has accepted, but as a participant, the only way to really know is to look in the assignment drop-down. This will change in the next version. It was one of those oversights that will be addressed.
Well, that’s all for now. Keep the feedback rolling-in. We’re very excited to have people using the app and we’re on a mission to make sure that it provides the best user experience possible.
Thanks!
Charlie
Posted by: charlie | June 12, 2009 | | categories: ChatterBox Info | tags: ChatterBox, Collaboration, Social Media, Twitter
As we approach our open beta launch, I thought it would be nice to follow-up on an item we wrote about previously. In our post “Meeting Jeremiah’s Developer Challenge,” we set out to meet a challenge for a set of functionality described by Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah created a post issuing a challenge to developers to create a crowd managed feed reader:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/04/11/developer-challenge-create-a-crowd-created-feed-reader
I’m happy to let you know that we achieved the goals described in our previous post. The challenge was to create a solution that addressed the following pain points:
“Finding people on Twitter, then following them is already a challenge. Sharing your hard earned list takes time. I deal with a lot of executives at companies, that want to quickly scan the topics in their industry, or see what their employees, customers, and competitors are doing. Searching by keyword isn’t sufficient. Carter Lusher has this large Twitter list of analysts, but in order to see their streams, adding each one is a manual process.”
You can easily meet this requirement with our new application. ChatterBox is a collaboration platform used to discover information pertaining to topics of interest on Twitter. An intelligent, single point of access, this web-based interface pulls in conversations and creates a collaborative workspace that provides topical views of information – along with features such as personalized views, assignment, categorization, prioritization, notifications and tagging – creating a more streamlined process to listen, organize and respond to conversations. As a result, social media power users and corporate teams can become far more effective in participating in relevant conversations, providing excellent customer service, and generating stronger business leads.
Jeremiah wanted to achieve the following use cases which we allow out of the box:
- I want to track all analysts in my industry, then I could [give] my executives a single URL so they can observe
- Give a sales rep a single webpage to see all the tweets coming out of their client
- Professional to quickly track all their industry counterparts tweets
- Have further features that allow very large feeds to segment by a variety of filters perhaps by location, popularity, and other metadata
- Be easy to use (feedback so far on this has been very positive)
There are some other items identified as requirements that we’re still considering. This includes things like public views, additional data sources, ChatterBox access requests and automated prioritization. If you would like to try out the private beta, please use the Contact form to request access. We would love to get your feedback.
Thanks!
Charlie
Posted by: charlie | June 2, 2009 | | categories: ChatterBox Info | tags: ChatterBox, crowdsource, Development, Social Media
