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Search TipTop for Weekend Fun

TipTop is a one-of-a-kind Twitter-based search engine. Whatever you need, TipTop Search helps you find the best advice, opinions, and answers as well as people to engage and share experiences with.

WoW! Is the statement above true? You bet your artichoke hearts it is:) I was just fussing around this morning and remembered a good friend was participating in the PA Renewable Energy Festival this weekend and decided to do a search on TipTop’s Event Channel to see if there was any real-time buzz. Not nearly as much real-time hupalala as the techcrunch50 event in San Francisco received earlier this week (on TipTop, look for “Search results from before…” to get all the best roundup Tips. The messages with red stars next to them have been ReTipped).

Looking on TipTop Search to see what is going on this weekend, I came across a variety of messages (tweets) from contributors to this organic twittersphere. They are listed below with some TipTop sharing tips you can use to engage and share experiences with other interesting folks.

A. Event Promotions:  Click “E” to expand url or just move your cursor or mouse over external links to see a snapshot view of the content before you commit to click. Check out some great gigs in the SF Bay Area this weekend.

B. Advice or Tip Requests:  “Reply” with an answer if you can help a person out or “ReTip” them with another persons snippet of helpful information.

C. Activity Partner Opportunities: Click “Reply” to the message if you are interested in joining in or “ReTip” the message if you think someone else would be a good match. Who knows where this might lead;).

D. Event or Activity Tips: Click “ReTip” or “Retweet” if you support, like, or are going to partake in said activity. Be real and share what you are passionate about.

E. Individual Activities or Plans: “ReTip” a persons message to let them and others know what you like or think is cool. You could open up opportunities for yourself or your followers….like the surprisingly popular activity of farm sitting!

Personally, I found out about the Northern California Renaissance Faire through TipTop Search and found out about ticket discounts, “ReTipped” the pirate invasion post, read event reviews, and discovered other positive and negative tips.

Explore TipTop Search everyday. It really does help you find the best advice, opinions, and answers as well as people to engage and share experiences with.

Have a great weekend,

Greg Martin & the TipTop Team

TipTop Search Widgets: Customize Content for your Website or Blog

TipTop Search Widgets are now available to add to your Website or blog. You can create a TipTop widget by (1) going to TipTop Search, (2) try some searches related to your Website or blog posting, and when satisfied with the search results (3) click , (4) customizing the the information fields in the widget creation browser window, and when you are satisfied with the widget preview, (5) click “Generate” to receive the widget code via Email. The application of TipTop Search Widgets are only limited by your creativity and blog platforms that allow the use of javascript code to be embeded (like Blogger or Typepad).TipTop Search Widget content comes in three flavors which automatically update for you once you have added them to your site:

• The “Top Tips and piTs” widget displays the top Tip and piT messages and authors for the specified search term.
• The “Tips and piTs ratios” widget displays the percentage of Tips and piTs (positive and negative sentiment) being written about the specified search term.
• The “Concept Cloud” widget displays all the related topics people are writing about related to the search term specified.

Here are some examples of TipTop Search Widgets in action. If your site or blog posting is about people, your readers will enjoy seeing the running commentary about a celebrity or famous personality like the Korean star Woo Young. As you can see you can interact with the @writers and the links they post in the messages. The automatic refreshing of Top Tip and piT messages will be indicated with a time stamp below the message. Your readers can easily get search results from Twitter by entering a query in the TipTop Search box at the top of the search widget. If your readers would be interested in quick opinion polling  results related to any subject try out the “Tips and piTs ratio” search widget. A good example of this sentiment snapshot is for hearing what real people are saying about new releases, like the Tarentino movie Inglorious Basterds.  

Below are a couple examples of the “Concept Cloud” widgets, which are helpful for your readers if the topic or theme of your website encourages research, discovery or a curiosity itch.

Ahimsa Village, a sustainable community group, is using the Concept Cloud widget to enable members to see what conversations are happening now on Twitter, in preparation for a talk about the economist Henry George.  This is a great way to get participants interested in an event and prepare for a discussion. A great idea for book club discussions as well!

Current events are often the subject of blog postings and the writings of many a journalist, so it is no surprise that a TipTop Concept Cloud widget was created to allow readers to delve deeper into the topic, Great Depression, in an article discussing the failure of recent economic models in the blog, Letters to Sachin.

If you would like more information to get started, below is a screen shot and clickable help link to the widget creation process.

If you want an easy way to engage the users of your website or stimulate the readers of your blog with real-time user-generated content, please try out and customize the TipTop Search Widgets to suit your needs. Please let us know where you are using the widgets, by sharing a comment on this post. For more information about TipTop Technologies check out our new corporate site.

Have a great week!

Greg Martin & the TipTop Team

Be Social with TipTop Search’s ReTip, ReTweet, and Reply

TipTop Search

TipTop is a one-of-a-kind Twitter-based search engine. Whatever you need, TipTop helps you find the best advice, opinions, and answers as well as people to engage and share experiences with. In last weeks blog we had occasion to feature a TipTop Fan’s story about shopping for a smartphone using TipTop. Usha highlighted some great aspects of TipTop Search, like the high relevancy and quality content of messages TipTop Search delivers into Top Tips and Top Pits for any given topic people are talking about on Twitter. Another equally important aspect of TipTop search results are the real people that are posting about the topics you search on and your ability to directly or indirectly interact with them. If you have a Twitter account, you can click the people’s images, next to the Tip and Pit message results, to see their profile page on Twitter. On their images you can click “To” or “From” to see the conversations they are engaged in through the eyes of TipTop Search. You can even search on their Twitter profile to see everything that is being said To, From, and About that profile. In this example, we used Ashton Kutcher. If you like following people, especially celebrities, try out TipTop’s People Channel.

The ability to directly communicate with the people that are posting these great messages TipTop Search finds for you is easy. At the bottom of each message in the search results you will see three boxes labeled Re-Tip, Retweet, and Reply. Say you are researching that smartphone and are on the fence between purchasing the iPhone or a G2 phone. You find this message and found the link useful for researching the G2. You need to share this great content with others, so click Re-Tip and share the message on Twitter and thus leave a breadcrumb for yourself and others. The message will look something like this when you update it on Twitter:

If there is a message you find interesting, funny, or useful you can also Retweet a message. For example,  “RT @centriq Yo the #G1 phone is the bomb!!! I can do mad stuff with this phone … Does anyone know when the #G2 is coming out?”. Finally, if you see a message from someone and want more information, need a more specific answer, etc., you can Reply to their message. For example, you want to know if this person found a solution to water proofing their G2 phone. Just click Reply, and type in your questions!

Things that you post, retweet, or reply to on Twitter all come together to create an online persona or personality of sorts. A fun way to see a Twitter user’s persona is to look at the concepts related to messages from, to or about them on Twitter. If we take the Ashton Kutcher example, you will see all the concepts related to Twitter messages that he posts or that are posted about him. Another way to look at search results is through TipTop Search Widgets that you can place on your blog or website. Look for the green box and click, “Embed these results” to build your TipTop Search Widget. An example of this Concept Cloud widget can be seen at the Ahimsa Village’s Blog.

There is lots of great stuff happening with TipTop Search so please stay tuned for more updates! As always you can follow us on Twitter @twittiptop or become a TipTop Fan on Facebook. Have a great week!

Greg Martin & the TipTop Team

My Search for a New Phone, and TipTop Results

TipTop Search

This week we have the privilege of sharing a story sent in from one of our TipTop Search users. If you’d like to share a TipTop search experience please send it along. In the meantime enjoy Usha’s story!

I’ve known for a long time that my small Samsung flip phone was on its last legs. I love it dearly, but as the summer went on, the battery life dwindled and dwindled. Seeing the writing on the wall, I began to think about what my next phone would be. TipTop was really useful in my research – after I made a list of phones I liked from Verizon’s website, I searched for the name of each one in TipTop. This was especially useful for newer phones, which many people have been tweeting about.

I discovered that most people like the LG enV3, a phone with a keyboard that I liked a lot. There’s also a touch-screen version of the enV, which I didn’t like so much. but the TipTop search revealed very few negative comments about the enV Touch, which was interesting to find out – most people seemed to like it.

But by far the most useful part of my TipTop research was what it DIDN’T show me: the search results that would not have helped me, like advertisements for the enV3 or “Do you think I should get an enV3?” were put in remaining messages so that I didn’t have to sort through them. This made the search really efficient, because everything I needed showed up in the first one or two pages of hits.

Last Saturday morning, my phone refused to turn on, and I knew the day had come. Nervous about replacing my trusty old phone, I pulled up a last-minute tiptop search before heading out to the Verizon store. It gave me confidence, because the Twitter community had good things to say about all of the phones I was considering buying. Now, I’m happy with a brand new blue env3. If you’re in the market for a new phone or any other gadget that you don’t know much about, a TipTop search is a fast and useful way to find out what others think.

Thanks Usha for all those tips! Have a great week everyone!

Greg & The TipTop Team

TipTop Search: Comparing Value in Your Results

Enter what you are looking for into the search box, and TipTop searches messages currently posted on Twitter by people, organizations, and companies. TipTop adds value by analyzing the messages and providing a result set of top tips displayed in columns of positive to-do tip-type messages, negative don’t do pit-type messages, or more factual remaining messages. The result set of Tip, Pit and Remaining messages can also be filtered by clicking related topics to the left of the search results and filtered by clicking the category tabs above the search results. TipTop’s results for your search queries provide a lot of valuable information, diverse perspectives, and positive ways to connect with other people. Below are some side-by-side comparisons highlighting the value of TipTop search

Twitter Search Results

results over other available services:

Getting married? Find out what others are experiencing and feeling during this time. See how people are finding solutions to hurdles (Tips) or how not to deal with a problem (Pits). Clicking the communication icons next to each message you can share you findings, opinions, and solutions with individual people or with the Twitter universe. By

CrowdEye Search Results

clicking links on the writer’s image you can learn about and communicate directly with a variety of people around the world who are either in the same situation as you or are interested in the topic you searched for.  To view comparable results for “getting married” on TipTop, Twitter and

TipTop Search Results

CrowdEye click the images to the right.

Movie theater or DVD? Need help deciding if you should go see Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs at the theater this weekend or wait for the DVD? TipTop’s social search results deliver contextually relevant real-time content that is embedded in text messages from Twitter users. Through TipTop search results you can (1) view how many people wrote positive and negative things about the movie, (2) filter results by category, like web pages, to only see messages with websites so you can read online reviews or view movie trailers on YouTube,

TipTop Search Results

and (3) safely start up

Google Search Resuls

a conversation with individual people you want to share thoughts with by clicking the communication icons found next to each message. Compare TipTop search results above and Google search results to the right. From what I saw you better see Ice Age in the theater!

Spam is everywhere even though Twitter is removing spam accounts. TipTop natural language search technology filters the noise/spam by extracting the best messages from quality users in the results set. Of course, if you are searching for spam, gratuitous advertising, or spammers you will probably find it, too.  A unique feature that TipTop Fans can use to improve the quality of results is to click the thumbs-up ReTip icon in a message  if you like a person’s tweet and want to express your appreciation directly. Below are examples of search results for “coupons” on Twitter, CrowdEye, and TipTop. 

Looking for friends, activity partners, or people interested in sustainable food? TipTop search results highlight the people that are writing about the topic you searched for. Looking at TipTop’s search results below you can click on a person’s image to view all the messages that have been written about them, sent To them or sent From them…all organized into Tips, Pits and Remaining messages. This gives you perspective on a person’s personality from which you can decide how to communicate with or about them through the communication tools ReTip, ReTweet, and Reply options placed next to each message. If you find a comparable service out there that brings together all these dynamic features, please ReTip it!

Want to get snazzy with social search? TipTop provides unique analysis of sentiment and filtering of current messages posted on Twitter by topics, categories, and advanced search options. As you can see below TipTop provides a lot of features and functionality on the search results pages in addition to the advanced search operators used on Twitter.

We hope TipTop helps you unlock the richness found in all this great content we are creating, sharing, and discovering every day to make all our lives more fruitful.

Have a great weekend!

Greg Martin & the TipTop Team

TipTop Searches Solar Eclipse

From: Life To: Life

TipTop reaches in and reaches out into your world, its up to you to explore the possibilities and share with others. Checking out TipTop’s FAQs and Search Results Page Help, watching the TipTop Search Video tutorial, or joining the TipTop Fan Page are great ways to get the most out of the current information and perspectives you are looking for through TipTop Search. On TipTop you can actually find what you and others are searching Twitter for.

This week’s TipTop conversation is around the most complete Solar Eclipse until 2132 taking place this Wednesday, July 22nd. Follow the links below to see TipTop results!

Ron Weasley: What is the best way to see the longest solar eclipse next week?

Hermione: The best place to see the eclipse is a village in India, 20 km from Patna, named Tarengana where Aryabhat, once upon a time, saw these astrological phenomena.

Ron Weasley: I’ll need some great pizza to watch this fire ball disappear!

Harry Potter: Well, we all know the best pizza is in New Haven, CT, at Pepes. But, I wonder about other ways to get views of the eclipse?

Professor McGonagall: A month or so ago I found a guy through TipTop saying he was going to India to watch the “solar eclipse of the century”.  He has a link to live webcams, one in Sasaram and one in Varanasi.

Dumbledore: Sorry, I can’t make this viewing. Snapes his fingers and disappears into…

We hope you enjoy whatever fun your weekend brings!

Greg Martin & the TipTop Team

What is your TipTop search result?

From: Life To: Life

Spending time reading and writing about peoples’ articles, blogs, and tweets about real-time search, live search, social search, algorithmic search or whatever is buzzing in the stratosphere this week can be interesting and entertaining, but hearing from people and implementing what they need to make their online and offline lives easier is really the most important thing above and beyond all the features, bells and whistles that get talked about. That said, Alex Goodall’s Twitter Resources Map is a very well developed tree of applications, tools, and widgets to get something out of the vast amount of content published and distributed through Twitter. To be honest, I have not spent a lot of time looking at or comparing other Twitter applications to the features and functionality that is built into TipTop. We at TipTop Technologies have been engaged in creating a new search and share experience, moving away from traditional search engine results towards semantically driven solutions that have embedded value for consumer and enterprise users. By grouping search results into Tips (content with positive to-do statements), Pits (content with negative don’t do statements), and Remaining messages (messages with neutral or factual content) TipTop search delivers real life options and decision making value. Capturing the experiences and opinions of users and being able to respond and share these things across a platform like Twitter is amazing. Being able to utilize and share this content through search results in an efficient and relevant way is what feeltiptop.com is all about. Here are some of TipTop’s search features and results:

View, ReTweet or Reply

• ReTweeting and replying to Twitter messages from topics you searched.
• Searching and viewing Twitter messages by Tips, Pits, and Remaining messages.
• Filtering and browsing Twitter messages by general categories or related topics found within the results data for your search.
• Viewing messages To, From and About Users and monitoring persona or brand sentiment via Tips and Pits.
• Expanding shortened urls  in messages to view the real source of linked content. Click E to Expand and S to Shrink.
• Viewing and responding to the positive and negative opinions about products, people, events, and places.
• Real time updates to your TipTop search results. Each search on TipTop generates a unique url or link which you can copy, bookmark or save on your site. For example: http://feeltiptop.com/weekend+getaway/. A suggested refresh rate for each search result is listed at the bottom of the search results page.

So please take a moment to share with us how you like your TipTop results. Let us know on Twitter, our TipTop Fan Page, through a Feedback Form, or post a comment on TipTop’s Blog.

Have a great weekend!

Greg Martin & the TipTop Team

TipTop, Social Search & Celebration

Folks are on the move this weekend. Some peeps are going hiking in Santa Cruz’s Big Basin State Park, some families are driving down to the Florida’s Bonita Springs, some folks are off to Japan to be with the Tokyo Gundam, and others are just celebrating American independence in their own way. Here at TipTop we are feeling groovy and and are excited to announce a few new features before this weekend’s celebrations.

1. Move the mouse cursor over “3T” to see the three most recent messages for your search.
2. Click “No Filter” to return to the original Tip & Pit results for your search. Note: clicking the category tabs or the related terms will fine tune the results.
3. When you click a related term, like “firework”, you are filtering results within the original search result set. To expand the results from your original search to include or exclude the related term “firework”, try clicking on the options linked below the Tips & Pits columns.
4. TipTop is about social search, so click on the icons at the end of a message to View (V), Retweet (RT), or Reply (@) to the writer’s message. Currently you need to have be member of Twitter to interact with others.
5. Know what you are clicking on! To view disguised links or URLs within the messages, click “E” to expand the link or “S” to shrink the link to the original short url.

We are constantly trying to improve your experience on TipTop, so please continue to send us feedback, share your TipTop search results with your Facebook and Twitter friends via the “fShare” and “tShare” links, and have a great weekend celebrating the freedom of choice.

Greg Martin & the TipTop Team

TipTop’s New Search Mojo

We’ve had an exciting couple weeks here after the initial launch of http://www.feeltiptop.com/ and wanted to let you know that TipTop’s mojo is rising with everyone’s help and feedback! We even have Google pagerank rising thanks to some great early stage product innovations. TipTop search result pages are also appearing in the top five Google results for long tail queries like “nyc weather horrible“.

The unique  and dynamic search results delivered by TipTop are what we continue to be most excited about. Where else can you find out how an event, product, person, or desire is being positively or negatively viewed and talked about, plus use these Tips and Pits daily to make informed decisions and share with others? We know there is  mucho mojo happening in TipTop’s search results pages, so we are excited to announce some changes to the search results page layout as well as some new features we have incorporated on the Hub page to help simplify things and make your experience using TipTop more rewarding. Let us know what you think about:

1. Filter or group  text  messages by general categories (People, Products, Places)  or refine results by clicking related terms.
2. Clearer labeling of search result column views:  Tips (to do), Pits (don’t do) & Remaining messages.
3. Clearer options to share TipTop results on Facebook and Twitter. [3] Share search results and related terms on Twitter or [4] share Tips % and Pits % by clicking fShare or tShare. 
4. Hub Page: Add TipTop to your browser’s search options.
5. Hub Page: Module with streaming examples of TipTop search results as shared on Twitter.

Please continue to use TipTop daily and continue to share your ideas and experiences with us. We really appreciate your support knowing you are as excited about using and sharing TipTip as much we are!

Greg Martin & the TipTop Team

TipTop is a platform for semantic analysis of natural language which provides live search results capturing individual and group sentiment, opinions, and experiences from content of various sorts including messages on Twitter.