The Ellerdale Project Blog

Ellerdale has been acquired by Flipboard

2010-07-20T23:37:00.000-07:00

This is a big news day for Ellerdale! Today, we announced the acquisition of our company by Flipboard, a brand new company, founded by Mike McCue and Evan Doll.

Today, Flipboard launched the world’s first social magazine that combines the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. It is available for iPad - check it out in the iTunes store, it’s a free app.

Flipboard turns social networks like Facebook and Twitter into a magazine with news updates, photos and articles your friends have shared. Viewing your social media stream this way makes it easier, faster and more entertaining to stay up to speed on the things that matter to you. You can also add sections based on topics such as sports, technology or fashion and Flipboard will show you the articles, images and conversations that experts on the topic are sharing. All in a magazine-style format.

Both teams are passionate about making social media more useful. The synergy between the two companies is obvious: while Ellerdale has been focused on building technology to increase relevancy, Flipboard has developed a new way for users to interact with social media content. Ellerdale’s Web Intelligence platform will become the relevancy engine in future versions of Flipboard.

In the last couple of years, we built our technology and we recently started showcasing it on trends.ellerdale.com. It was a great project to work on and we’re excited that it’s now found a real home. Therefore, this transition unfortunately means that we no longer will be able to maintain the Ellerdale website. As you may have seen, it’s no longer available. We apologize if this change causes any inconveniences. We’re currently informing our API partners about the usage of our API.

For us at Ellerdale it means we get to further develop our technology for a company that will change the way we experience social media. Seeing is believing in this case... If you have an iPad, please check out the Flipboard app in the app store and let us know what you think!

Thank you for all your support...

Conversation with Liz Gannes

2010-07-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

We recently had a great meeting with Liz Gannes from GigaOm. She posted a story about The Ellerdale Project and even included a video of the interview she had with Arthur. Here it is:

Follow Twitter users from Ellerdale's Trends site

2010-06-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

We've taken the first step to integrate Twitter's @anywhere. When using our Trends site you can now choose to log in with your Twitter account.

One of the benefits of using your Twitter login is the ability to start following other Twitter users from our pages. For instance, if you follow the tweet stream for a specific keyword or topic you can easily follow tweeps. By hovering over a Twitter name, a hover card pops up with the bio and a follow button. You can do this anywhere a Twitter user name is visible.

Stay tuned for deeper @anywhere integration in the future.

Personalize your view of the stream

2010-05-26T16:38:00.000-07:00

It’s been a little quiet on our blog... We’ve been bogged down working on new features and functionality. Today you can see the first results on trends.ellerdale.com

You can now reorder the message stream based on relevance. Browse or search to a topic page and you’ll see a chronological stream of messages. We added a pull-down menu at the top-right of the stream to let you choose a stream of "live messages" (chronological order) or "top messages" (based on relevance).

For instance, if you do a search for #tcdisrupt --the hash-tag for the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that is taking place in New York this week-- you’ll see the live stream of messages. But if you re-order the message stream by “top messages, this week”, you see the highlights of the conference in the form of the most relevant messages. We give you the option to see the most relevant messages in the last two hours, the last 24 hours, the last week or last month.

Once you’ve set your preference you can also subscribe to that version of the stream via RSS -- that way, you receive a feed of the most important messages on a keyword or topic. You can also turn your preferred view of the stream into a widget that you can embed on your blog or website. By clicking on the little icon with the gears (it turns red when you hover over it as shown in the image below) you’re taken to the widget creator.

We also let you close sections of the topic page with the little triangle icon on the section headers. If you just want to see stories and are not interested in retweet stats for example, you can hide the stats section.

You only have to set your preferred view once and we’ll remember it for all the pages you visit on trends.ellerdale.com. This is just the beginning of the personalization options... there’s more to come so stay tuned. In the meantime, we’d love to know what you think of this feature and which other ways you would like to be able to personalize our pages.

Twitter is a platform

2010-04-20T10:38:00.000-07:00

One of my takeaways from last week’s Chirp conference is that Twitter is building a platform. It’s more than a service to exchange 140 character messages. Static websites are going out of style and are being replaced by real-time streams. And with its more than 105 million registered users Twitter and 300,000 signing up every day, Twitter is in a strong position to take the lead in the real-time realm.

An even more important indicator for that, aside from the rapidly growing number of tweets and users, is the large and vibrant ecosystem that has formed around Twitter. Today, there are 100,000 apps that use or support Twitter. That’s pretty amazing for a company that’s only been in business for three years.

If I look at my own Twitter account, I see that I use over 25 of them, including Plancast, Tweetvite, Tweetdeck, Klout, Foursquare and TwitPic. One helps me manage my Twitter stream, another lets me use my account to track my friends’ social calendars, a third let’s me insert media into my own Twitter stream and yet another one let’s me track and gauge my influence and that of others. With all these apps, Twitter is becoming more useful and increasingly important medium for me to stay connected with the people that matter to me.

Tiger Woods: spot vs. spoof

2010-04-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

This is a big weekend for Tiger Woods, the sport of golf, and Nike. So no surprise: he’s the most talked about person in sports on the Web.

As Tiger returned to the professional golf circuit, his chief corporate sponsor, Nike, released a commercial featuring Earl Woods, Tiger's deceased father. There is a lot of chatter about Tigger’s return to the Masters and his performance, but what drove even more conversation was the Nike commercial.The initial release of the black-and-white clip with a voice-over of Tiger’s dad caused a spike in messages, but the subsequent parodies generated even more conversation. I wonder if Nike’s brand manager and Tiger’s PR team are keeping an eye on the real-time Web?

Mashable wrote about the Nike commercial, which became the most shared story about the Nike commercial. The Huffington Post article turned out to be the most popular story about the spoofs. Even though I’m not a sports fan, I’m curious to see what will develop over the coming days.

Ellerdale hires Executive Social Butterfly

2010-04-05T16:19:00.000-07:00

I'd like to welcome the latest member to the Ellerdale team: Christel van der Boom. Christel will fill the role of executive social butterfly (aka vp of marketing) and she will be responsible for all Ellerdale communications, PR, and messaging. Christel joined us from Edelman, the largest independent PR firm, where she was a senior vice president focussed on digital media companies.

This is an exciting development for Ellerdale. Christel's experience in positioning and messaging in the social media space will complement our technical expertise perfectly.

Welcome on board!

Christel on Twitter: xtel

Following the Madness

2010-03-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

We're doing our part to help sports fans, gamblers, and otherwise assiduous college students follow the NCAA Basketball Tournament. For each game, we present a page with real-time messages, and articles for both teams. The excitement online clearly mirrors the emotion on the court, and upsets are felt on Twitter as well as in the locker room.

Personally, I'm rooting for upsets, which seem to generate more online reaction. So, to watch real-time Web conversations while you watch Saturday's Final Four games, visit the ellerdale sports page.

Ready for growth

2010-03-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that our trends site was down for maintenance today. We moved our servers to a new place that we can more easily expand as we grow. We've made improvement that will help limit down-time in the future and we added new hardware to handle the ever increasing volume of data, traffic, and API customers.

Today, there are 600 Tweets per second that we all process in real time, and we expect that number to steadily go up. We also anticipate that we'll be adding more real-time data streams from other sources to our platform over the coming months.

Now that people are starting to discover our site we see the number of visitors go up. We've also had interest for our API that we released a couple of weeks ago and we expect that number to grow as well. All good news, and enough reason to get ready for growth.

Tim Berners-Lee explains the importants of the Semantic Web

2010-03-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

It is not the first time that Tim has a good idea (he invented the web itself), but this is particularly good one. How about we link all the world's data together in a way that it can be used in for search, data mining, and a other applications. This is the next big transition for the Internet.

This is why we started Ellerdale. Make data more connected, more available, more consistent, and more valuable. We are only at the beginning of this new revolution, we need more time, resources, and people, but it is an extremely exciting project.

Ellerdale API

2010-03-12T08:14:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first alpha version of the Ellerdale API. Using this simple REST based API you can begin to explore the Ellerdale data set from your application and perform simple data analysis of the latest real-time data based on complex search queries.

Details on each API method can be found on our developer page. All access will require authentication. You can request access by filling out the API access request form.

Please note that the API is under development, and that there will be changes and extensions over time. Please send any feedback or questions to api@ellerdale.com.

oscars... the after party

2010-03-08T15:41:00.000-08:00

Everyone likes a winner. Leading up to the Best Picture announcement, online conversations about Avatar easily eclipsed all other nominee conversations. However, when Tom Hanks presented the Best Picture Award to the Hurt Locker, the collective focus shifted. People stopped talking so much about Avatar, and started talking about Hurt Locker.

It was also interesting to see our trending people change with each Oscar presenter... nice work Ben Stiller.

...and the Oscar goes to...

2010-03-05T16:32:00.000-08:00

The Academy Awards are a ton of fun, and we wanted to be part of the party. So, we built a special page that follows and graphs the messages for all the Best Picture nominees: trends.ellerdale.com.

It’s fun to see the films people are talking about most, and how the conversation is changing. We even built the ability to change the time scale, so you can focus on the most recent conversations, or look at the longer trends. It should get interesting in the hours proceeding and following the Best Picture award on Sunday.

One more tip... if “Avatar” and “Hurt Locker” are crowding out the other nominees, you can un-check any of the films to focus on the nominees you like best.

Have fun following the ceremony.

Ellerdale turns on the Twitter firehose

2010-03-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Ellerdale!

An increasing number of people are using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to get their news. Last week, Twitter revealed that their users send over 50 million tweets per day. That is almost 600 tweets per second! Who can keep up with that staggering amount of conversation and sharing? That’s where we come in. We have built a web intelligence platform that makes sense of large, real-time data feeds.

Today, Twitter announced Ellerdale as one of a handful of companies to get access to the full stream of tweets. Twitter is one of the most exciting companies on the Internet right now and and we’re excited to be part of a first group of companies having access to the complete firehose. We are planning to do cool things with this data, bringing you top trends, allowing you to search tweets and categories, as well as generating fun statistics.

Trends

We’ve been working on ellerdale for over a year and we’re excited to show you the first application of our web intelligence platform: ellerdale trends.

The trends site gives you a live overview of topics that are trending on the Web right now. We let you browse through the world’s conversations in real time by showing you what topics matter now. We currently support over 5 million topics and display trends in 12 categories. You can easily find topics and categories that interest you – just type them into the search box.

In one quick snapshot, you can see which stories are most shared, what people are saying about them and how topics relate to each other. Give it a try, and you’ll see top trends in categories such as politics, music, film and companies. You’ll see if President Obama is more talked about than Tiger Woods, and if Haiti is higher on our radar than Hawaii.

How we do it

We are able to connect the dots between related stories and trends, even if tweets refer to the same thing in different ways. For example, tweets can refer to ‘Arnold Schwarzenegger’ as ‘The Governator,’ just ‘Arnold,’ or even ‘Ahnuld’. The Ellerdale web intelligence platform uses our semantic technology to make sense of these variations, even in short messages.

Our technology identifies topics in tweets and rss feeds and then computes trends, analyzes discussions, and makes sense of the stream in real-time. Real-time data is especially difficult to analyze. To keep pace with large, real-time streams, we have developed a fault-tolerant, distributed database that simultaneously indexes and serves search requests.

Our engineering team has developed great technology that mines real-time streams and then links topics, messages and articles together based on content, not just keywords. If you’d like to know more about our team and technology, check out the company pages on our website.