Talk Digger will slowly roll out. What it needs if more content, more users and more interaction (relation between users, comments, conversation pages crawling by other search engines like Google, MSN Search, Yahoo! (it already started slowly). Then more patterns would emerge, conversations will build up, and people will get in contact.

However critics of Talk Digger are right: it is not perfect; it lacks indexed data and few bad results popup from time to time into conversations.

 

Validating the vision

Critics are right, but at the same time people are slowly validating the vision I had, the seed idea underlying the current implementation of Talk Digger.

When I read other people articles about this new service, I find that they know what it is all about, how it could help them in their day-to-day work and ultimately how it could be enhanced to meet their specific needs.

 

Current state of the system

I started to check how people were using the new features of this new system. As expected I have far more page views with this new version than the previous one. People search, browse and track conversations.

One thing that surprised me is that far more people than I initially thought were using the “Related conversation” tab of each Conversation Page.

I thought that I was alone, but it seems that many people use it not only to find out the relations between conversations (so relations between web pages, and ultimately people) but also to find new and interesting stuff from a starting point. So the process of browsing conversations using their relations is becoming the process of finding new and interesting stuff.

 

Improving the system

Considering that the vision I had of the system is slowly validated by other people’s reviews, a lot of stuff will come in the next months.

 

Crawling for more data

One of the biggest update is also the less time consuming (in the point of view of development time): indexing more and more data into the system (so crawling more and more conversations). It will be done by itself, as time go, with users’ searches and tracks.

 

Parsing out bad results

Another big improvement of the system will be to parse out bad results (irrelevant links from a web page to another web page (conversation)). It will enable the system to check the context of each link, considering their releventness, rating them accordingly and ultimately refusing to index it into the system if it is too irrelevant.

 

Automatic conversation topics finder (auto-tagging)

Many users are searching for tags. The problem is that there are few considering that the system is young, so no many conversations are “tracked” by users (because tags came from tags term used by users when they start tracking a conversation).

So the system could eventually extract conversation topics. That way, the “search tag” feature could become a “search by topics”.

Ultimately, these topics could use to cluster search results and find new relationship between conversations (relationships via topics instead of document links).

 

The future

This is only a part of the future; other ideas are incubated in my mind. It is just the beginning as we know it. Much more is to come…

Technorati: Talkdigger | semantic | web | conversation | memetracker | topics | search | engine | future |