Sitdowns With Startups Episode 5: PostPost

Twitter can be an amazing source for relevant, interesting and timely content (and much more). However, trying to keep up with your stream can feel a bit like drinking from a firehouse at times. With tweets scrolling by at a rapid pace, it can be easy to miss a fair amount even while monitoring the stream, let alone what’s missed during time spent away from Twitter.  In addition, the Twitter search function leaves a lot to be desired, most notably the inability to narrow results to Tweets from the folks you follow. PostPost is a Twitter search tool that alleviates these two issues, letting users “dive into your timeline without drowning in it.” As TNW put it, “PostPost takes advantage of the Twitter API in a valiant attempt to corral the endless stream of data, and help make sense of it.”

I recently sat down for a chat with Founder Brad Noble to hear more about PostPost. In the following video, he talks about PostPost’s origins, some of the ways in which it’s useful and a fun tip for generating interesting search results:

If you can’t see the video above, please click here to watch it.

I used PostPost a number of times as a job seeker when sending e-mails to prospective employers in which I wanted to illustrate the regularity with which I was discussing their brand or industry on Twitter. I wanted to do so in a manner that didn’t require them to scan through over 1,000 tweets or simply take my word for it. I used a PostPost search of a keyword and narrowed the results to show only my own Tweets. For example, if I were to contact Dunkin Donuts, I would search “Dunkin” (which would appear quite often as I am a big fan of both their coffee and their brand). I could then send a link to an easily viewable list of each Dunkin reference I have made on Twitter.

For more on PostPost, you can read ReadWriteWeb’s recent PostPost Fixes Twitter’s Sucky Search piece. David Carr, a columnist for the New York Times, also had the following to say about PostPost in a recent interview with TheVerge.com:

“In the past week I have been looking at something called PostPost, which data-mines the people you follow to see what are the most persistent topics. That I’m interested in, because I’ve already picked those guys to iterate the web for me. I don’t like keeping an eye on Twitter all the time, so I like that PostPost can pull down what the people I follow have been discussing.”

To read and/or watch more from this series, please visit http://SitdownsWithStartups.com

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3 Comments on “Sitdowns With Startups Episode 5: PostPost”

    • Dave Cutler Says:

      No, thank you sir! I appreciate you taking the time to share PostPost’s story. Great stuff!

      Reply

      • Makondo Says:

        Hello Dave,I’ve been receiving your Emails for a cpuloe of months and it’s nice to see your output. I am using very old but good equipment. There are surely others out there that cannot keep up with finding the cash reserves to replace with with the latest and greatest too!I have a Dual G450 Power PC G4 Mac running both OS9.2 Classic and OS 10.4.11. On OS9 I still run Final Cut Pro 2.I have heaps of video on the hard drives but the camera, is shot, through a lightning strike. In Brisbane, they quoted A$800 to replace the mother board in the Panasonic NVDX11EN about 5 years ago.I gave up and switched over to building a website presence. Now i’m back re-inventing myself. The strike blew the firewire port on this (the Mac), machine too.So, i’m sort of crippled, busting my whatevers hoping for it rain buyers of paintings sometime soon.I produced a one hour documentary DVD between 1999 and 2002. See the DVD DOCO page on the website. Some of the material, I am now trying to sell to local resort businesses to put on their websites. My problem seems to be that I only have a choice between avi and mov. The avi, no matter what I do with it, ends up being too pixelated on YouTube, and the mov ends up taking forever to upload (1500/256) and is jerkey on playback. I’v been spending hours and hours trying to find best outcomes. I also need to be able to take out samples on my 4GB LaCie solid state harddrive. The mov. though nice and sharp, being 10 times the file size of mp4 will not play back off the LaCie, just jeking to a dead stop, while the mp4 is not really sharp enough to impress prospective buyers of footage.I’ve been careful to maintain the keyframe rate as an even division of the playback rate e.g., 4/30 or 5/25.I’ve been careful to maintain the field dimensions as identical in both the export mode and the conversion mode.I’m employing fast start, compressed header in the export mode, (from FCP).I have not got a clue what to do with the bitrate in the conversion process from mov to mp4.Can you address this issue? I don’t know anybody who understands anything i’m talking about.Kind regards,Tom Draper.

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