Talk Digger is now 3 months old and many things changed since I had the idea to create the service and today.

I developed Talk Digger because I wanted to interrogate many search engines at once to know who was linking back to my blog. I wanted to create that application to save time and being able to quickly know who was talking about my writings and being able to contact them as soon as possible.

Then I choose to put the service publicly available to anyone, like me, that could benefit by using it. The answer has been instant: thousands of people used it less then a week after it have been publicly available. Some people even talked about a buzz.

This inflow of new users, with their comments, suggestions and questions, helped me to find new ways to use and implement Talk Digger. Then the concept of Talk Digger as a tool that help people to search for a conversation that is evolving around a specific URL is born. New ways to use Talk Digger have been developed such the bookmarklet, the creation of RSS web feeds populated with Talk Digger search results, and finally the creation of a link that a blogger or a webmaster can put on his web page to redirect their users to Talk Digger with a specific URL they predefined. Some usability features have also been developed during that time.

All these things have been developed, implemented and debugged during the first online month of Talk Digger. However, what happened during the last two months? Some people probably noticed that nothing really changed since two months, and they are right: nothing really changed; I only fixed bugs.

So, what is happening? Is Talk Digger service development stopped? On ice? Or even dead?

Definitely not!

Right, the development of Talk Digger in the last two months have been marginal, however it growth exponentially. In the last two months a worked with a client to implement Talk Digger in one of their product that permit them to use all the power of Talk Digger into their software. I will talk about it further when the new version of that software will be available, in the next week or two. This contract took most of my time in the last two months.

Then, why the development of Talk Digger growth exponentially? Because since the beginning of Talk Digger I am thinking about how I could develop the basic idea behind Talk Digger: “a social tool that helps people to find and follow conversations that evolve around a specific URL” even further. Since then, many ideas poped-up in my mind, most of them have been investigated, and some of them are on the way to be developed and implemented in Talk Digger.

The future of Talk Digger, for the next months, is simple: making the basic idea evolving in such a way that Talk Digger will be a social tool of choice to find, follow and analyze conversations evolving on the Internet.

People are talking about Web 2.0; personally I am talking about the Semantic Web. I am talking about a way to see and broadcast information in such a way that any application or software agent would easily be able to analyze and use that information. I already talk about the fact that I was orienting my professional career in that way. This said, the only way to go in that direction is by trying to implement the principles into a real application that anybody could use, knowing or not what the terms semantic web, blogs, information overload, or any other technical terms, mean.

Great, but what is the next step? The next step is to upgrade the basic framework of Talk Digger. The idea I have behind the next generation of Talk Digger only want one thing: information. So the next step is to gather even more information. There are the two next things I will develop in the next couple of weeks to make it happens:

• Returning the last 10 results of each search engines instead of the last 3.
• Supporting even more search engines.

I hope I answered to some questions you could have with that little article on the history and future of Talk Digger. A thing is sure: Talk Digger evolved in the last two months and many things are coming for the next months.

However, this service would not be what he is right now without you, Talk Digger users, and your feedbacks, questions and suggestions. This is probably the think I like the most: discussing of Talk Digger with people that use it, and to see how they use it or how they would like to use it. So do not hesitate to contact me if you would like to talk about it or to talk about anything else, it is always a pleasure to received, read and answer your emails!