Recently, one of Twitter’s top search engineers tweeted that Twitter was set to “change search forever.” This proclamation sparked a hearty round of speculation and excitement about what was coming down the pipe for Twitter search.

The actual announcement featured the introduction of autocomplete and the ability to search within the subset of people on Twitter that you follow — both long-anticipated features.

However, while certainly a technical accomplishment (Twitter operates a huge scale and building these features must have been very difficult), this was an iterative improvement to search…an evolution, not a revolution.

Today I’m proud to announce something that I think could actually be revolutionary.

 

And here’s the video….

 

My CTO/Co-founder, Dominiek ter Heide, and I have been working for 2 years on an engine for making sense of social media. It’s called Bottlenose, and we started with a smart social dashboard.

Now we’re launching the second stage of our mission “to organize the world’s attention” — a new layer of Bottlenose that provides a live discovery portal for the social web.

This new service measures the collective consciousness in real-time and shows you what the crowd is actually paying attention to now, about any topic, person, brand, place, event… anything.

If the crowd is thinking about it, we see it. It’s a new way to see what’s important in the world, right now.

This discovery engine, combined with our existing dashboard, provides a comprehensive solution for discovering what’s happening, and then keeping up with it over time.

Together, these two tools not only help you stay current, they provide compelling and deep insights about real-time trends, influencers, and emerging conversations.

All of this goes into public beta today.

An Amazing Team

I am very proud of what we are launching today, in many ways — while still just a step on a longer journey — it is the culmination of an idea I’ve been working on, thinking about, dreaming of… for decades… and I’d love you to give it a spin.

And I’m proud of my amazing technical team — they are the most talented technical team I’ve ever worked with in my more than 20 years in this field.

I have never seen such a small team deliver so much, so well. And Bottlenose is them – it is their creation and their brilliance that has made this possible. I am really so thankful to be working with this crew.

Welcome to the Bottlenose Public Beta

So what is Bottlenose anyway?

It is a real-time view of what’s actually important across all the major social networks — the first of its kind — what you might call a “now engine.”

This new service is not about information retrieval. It’s about information awareness. It’s not search, it’s discovery.

We don’t index the past, we map the present. That’s why I think it’s better to call it a discovery engine than a search engine. Search implies research towards a specific desired answer, whereas discovery implies exploration and curiosity.

We measure what the crowd is paying attention to now, and we build a living, constantly learning and evolving, map of the present.

Twitter has always encouraged innovation around their data, and that innovation is really what has fueled their rapid growth and adoption. We’ve taken them at their word and innovated.

We think that what we have built adds tremendous value to the ecosystem and to Twitter.

But while Twitter data is certainly very important and high volume, Bottlenose is not just about Twitter… we integrate the other leading social networks too: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Flickr, and even networks whose data comes through them like Pinterest and Instagram. And we also see RSS too.

We provide a very broad view of what’s happening across the social web — a view that is not available anywhere else.

Bottlenose is what you’d build if you got the chance to start over and work on the problem from scratch — a new and comprehensive vision for how to make sense of what’s happening across and within social networks.

We think it could be for the social web what Google was for the Web. Ok that’s a bold statement – and perhaps it’s wishful thinking – but we’re at least off to a good start here and we’re pushing the envelope farther than it has ever been pushed. Try it!

Oh and one more thing, why the name? We chose it because dolphins are smart, they’re social, they hunt in pods, they have sonar. We chose the name as an homage to their bright and optimistic social intelligence. We felt it was a good metaphor for how we want to help people surf the Stream.

Thanks for reading this post, and thanks for your support. If you have a few moments to spare today, we’d love it if you gave Bottlenose a try. And remember, it’s still a beta.

Note: It’s Still a Beta!

Before I get too deep into the tech and all the possibilities and potential I see in Bottlenose, I first want to make it very clear that this is a BETA.

We’re still testing, tuning, adding stuff, fixing bugs, and most of all learning from our users.

There will be bugs and things to improve. We know. We’re listening. We’re on it. And we really appreciate your help and feedback as we continue to work on this.

Want to Know More?

How Bottlenose Could Improve the Media and Enable Smarter Collective Intelligence