Thoora's Blog

Making Thoora Better, 1 Feature At a Time

thoora — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:26:00 +0000

Thoora brings you What The World is Talking About. Twitter has accelerated how quickly the world starts talking, and we’ve made some big changes to reflect that.

1. Rather than waiting for reaction to appear in blogs, we now look to Twitter to start getting it as quickly as possible. We continue to look to blogs as well.
2. It can take some time for reaction to build, and this is still true with Twitter included. When stories are new we call them “developing stories”, and while you could see them on Thoora in the past, you had to click a “Today’s Headlines” tab. The biggest developing stories now appear at top right, and you can see more by clicking “Developing”
3. Each story summary shows how many tweets the story is getting per hour, with a “sparkline” that shows how the number has been going up and down over the last 24 hours.
4. If you’re on a BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android you now automatically see a mobile version of the site. If you have another device, you can see it at http://m.thoora.com
5. When you do a search on Thoora, the results are now presented to you much more clearly. If we can find a story matching your search terms, we give you a preview of it and quick access to its contents.
6. Story pages now have a Share button for you to share the story via Google Buzz, in addition to the existing buttons for Facebook and Twitter and email.

We hope you like the improvements. We always welcome your comments: every page on http://thoora.com has a Feedback button on the right-hand side. Also if you message us on Twitter @thooraNews we will be happy to answer your questions.

Thoora is Getting Bigger – Our URLs Are Getting Smaller!

thoora — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:41:11 +0000

It has been a crazy time over here and we are getting a lot of great feedback about our beta.
We have noticed a lot of people sharing links to Twitter and Facebook which is great!
To make things easier, and shorter in this world of sharing, we have moved the beta prefix in our URL’s.
So update your bookmarks! Update your RSS feeds! And start sharing!

It is amazing how much a difference 5 characters can make

Note that the old links to beta.thoora.com will point you in the right direction.
We are still in beta, and always happy to hear comments, suggestions and new ideas.

More News Coverage of Thoora

thoora — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:58:05 +0000

Since we launched the public beta last week at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, there’s been a steady flow of really great media and blog coverage. The most recent is a review in the Globe & Mail.

Thrillist Thrilled by Thoora

thoora — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:57:45 +0000

Before Thoora launched last month at TechCrunch50, we spent a long time quietly developing the technology, including our proprietary algorithm, that powers our news discovery service, which scours the entire blogosphere, Twitter and nearly 5,000 traditional media sources to determine the stories attracting the most buzz and attention.

So, it’s gratifying and exciting to see people talking about Thoora, and how we’re different from the existing news services. A good example of the positive reception is a review from Thrillist, a popular Web site that puts the spotlight on the new products and services. Here’s an excerpt:

What did the world think of TC50?

thoora — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:53:05 +0000

It’s been 2 weeks since Thoora went into private beta at TechCrunch50, and we hope that all the other TC50 companies are doing well. We meant to post these stats up right away but we have been super busy keeping all our beta users happy. It was amazing to see companies from around the world, presenting new tech, new products and new business ideas. Though we were fortunate to catch all of the presentations, we found it difficult to get a good idea of what people’s overall reaction to the companies and presentations was. So what do you do when you’re sitting on access to over 80 million blogs, Twitter and 4.5K news sources? We asked the crowds what they thought, more specifically we used the Thoora platform to give us an idea of what people thought about TC50. Here are some stats that show how the online world reacted to various companies, and each group. Twitter has been scaled back about x10, which really shows how hot the activity is on Twitter (much more so than the news and blog domain). We also make the distinction between blogs and news depending on the source. Generally we look at personal blogs as “blogs” and traditional news sources, professional/company blogs as “news”.

Each group was broken down into the following categories. For more information, please visit the techcrunch50 website. We can see here that group 2 and 8 were the most amongst people generating the most amount of buzz during the TC50 week.

Group 1: Youth & Games
Group 2: New Frontiers
Group 3: New Advertising & Monetization Platforms
Group 4: Local & Classified Marketplaces
Group 5: Business Applications
Group 6: Subscription & Commerce Marketplaces
Group 7: News & Media Discovery
Group 8: Social Media Streams

The winner of TC50 was Redbeacon who can be seen here with the largest blog reaction and made the biggest impact on Twitter. Included here are some stats for some other companies that made a big splash including: CitySourced, Threadsy, AnyClip, iTwin and Spawn Labs.

Click here to see full image

Finally, we took a look at the reaction from Twitter as each company walked on stage. Note for this graph we have limited displaying a condensed traffic spike per company so that each company can be seen. We have also highlighted the company from each group that got the most reaction on Twitter. The timescale has been adjusted so that we can see each company one after another. Just to clarify, in the example of Redbeacon, the volume during and following their presentation has been condensed so the viewer can get a general idea of the Twitter reaction. The companies are displayed in order, and out of courtesy, we only display 8. If you want to find your company, you just need to remember when you presented.

Looking back, it was a great week, and at the end of the day, its nice to get a quick snapshot of what people around the world thought too.

Thoora is busy here at TechCrunch50!

thoora — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:50:20 +0000

It’s been quiet around here for the last few months, but believe me, our developers have been working around the clock. Right now some of the Thoora team is in San Francisco for the TechCrunch50 conference. It’s going to be a crazy next couple of days, and if you bump into one of the Thoora team members, give us a shout!

Thanks for checking us out, please follow us on Twitter @thooranews

A Blog Post Falling In an Empty Forest..

thoora — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:02:50 +0000

A recent New York Times article discussed the dilemma that most new and seasoned bloggers face. The audience, or lack there of. Many blogs are abandoned for many reasons, as explained by the NYT, including lack of readers, fame or fortune. Ironically they also mention the story of a blogger who quit the game because she became too famous, which seemed to contradict the overall theme of the article.

But do we blog for fame and fortune? Does everyone start a new post hoping for the entire world to read it?
It can be frustrating to spend a good deal of time an energy into a blog only to see the dreadful (0 Comments) a week later under the post.

So what is the solution? For the people who only write to express themselves, then there is actually no problem, and they should continue to write. For those who are looking to seek a larger audience, I say that they should just keep on writing. If what they write is relevant, good quality, and full of opinion, someone out there will find interest in what they have to say.

Reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html?ref=style

Thoora Blogs, because you blog

thoora — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:40:34 +0000

Thoora is online!

We love reading blogs, so it seemed perfectly fitting that we start our own blog. Check back here for updates from our development team and find out what is new and exciting with Thoora.