New Social Discovery Engine ‘Bottlenose’ Aims To Take Over Real-Time Exploration

An impressive new social discovery & monitoring tool, Bottlenose, launched a public beta today. From real-time events, trending news and popular pictures, Bottlenose can help users connect with what’s happening now. Simply put, Bottlenose is aiming to be the Google of real-time content.

The technology behind Bottlenose is not only responsive but also extremely useful for both companies and consumers alike. Bottlenose has unique positioning, geared more towards consumers than most other professional tools while still being more enterprise level than most social options on the market.

Unlike enterprise social monitoring options like Radian6, Bottlenose can work for individuals who simply want to follow along or stay up-to-date with news. Bottlenose leverages tabs (called apps) that help to sort, organize and display data from all social networks. The backbone of Bottlenose is StreamOS, an 8-patented system, to measure current trends and customized interest graphs for each user.  StreamOS assigns Streamsense (a PageRank for social content) to each item, helping to determine what is the most important content for each user.

Bottlenose isn’t a social network, rather a source to aggregate content from the major networks. Bottlenose CEO Nova Spivack stated “We’re mapping the global mind in real-time. It’s a new way to tap into collective consciousness that literally lets you see what the world is thinking.”

Bottlenose Apps

Some of the key aspects of Bottlenose is the ability to sort and display data to create customized views.

Now: The main Bottlenose results show in the ‘Now’ app once a topic has been typed into the search bar.  This app serves as a true dashboard for a given search term.  Users can view news trends, related topics, pictures, users, comments and recent links directly from the dashboard.

Each of these search streams can be saved into a customized dashboard for quick recall. The dashboard look is similar to Google Reader or HootSuite and allows for quick browsing of a topic.

Paper: The Paper app allows users to view stream updates in a format that takes cues from both Pinterest and Flipboard. Each article deemed news displays in a bucketed newpaper-like layout. Clicking on a story takes users offsite directly to the article page.

Pictures: Much like Google Images, the Pictures tab pulls in the most recent images on a topic. Images are pulled in real-time, and can continuously stream in if the window is open. This streaming visual could be quite useful for prominent events such as natural disasters, breaking news or popular events.

Scanner: A terminal-type view of a topic can be found within the scanner app. Users can see quick sentiment analysis, activity, updates, links, trending people and users from one’s networks. This view looks quite similar to some professional tools and would be a go-to for marketers.

Sonar: The sonar app breaks down crucial elements of a trend into a visual graph. Topics, people and hashtags are combined to show related topics. Here’s an example of watching sonar during a Cubs game. When following the Cubs query, the closer “Marmol” rose to the top as he notched the save.

The technology is built on a fully distributed platform that leverages users browsers to display data.  Currently each user can process 3000 message per second.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUCcxGDzZDs[/youtube]

Bottlenose plans to use the freemium model with pro & enterprise versions planned. For more information see the above video or view the official press release.

About The Author

Greg Finn

Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.