Ten Ways to Use SwiftRiver

On August 30th we'll release the first public beta of the SwiftRiver platform, an open source toolkit of semantic web technologies. It's been a busy few months as we've been working round the clock to bring you a solid product. One of the questions I'm asked frequently is "What can I use SwiftRiver for?" Here are a few examples: 1. Monitoring Real-Time Conversations The most obvious use of Swift, what organizations like Ushahidi will use it for, is to help manage large streams of real-time content. Whether from blogs, twitter, email, SMS or other means, when something happens (ex. the Haiti Earth Quakes or Kanye West and Taylor Swift at the VMAs) there's a flurry of activity immediately following the event. For someone collecting news on that subject, for whatever reason, we envision that they would download an instance of Swift, and begin monitoring a number of sources discussing said event. 2. Brand Monitoring Similar to the scenario above, a PR firm or advertising agency might use Swift to monitor mentions of company's brand online. This would of course include mentions on Twitter, but might also include SMS and Email campaigns. 3. Data Collection / Research As a research tool, Swift's veracity algorithms can be used to curate sources and content that the user trusts to offer more accurate information. 4. Sweeping through Email If you don't understand anything about the real-time web or the aforementioned ideas. One of the things almost everyone can relate to, is the need for ways to improve email filtering. Swift is something anyone can set up to help them sort their email by ranking the people you are likely to want to hear from higher than the people you don't. Meanwhile, users can apply language processing tools to automatically sort email by subject, category or sender. 5. Sweeping Through SMS Even users who don't deal with the web at all may find use in SwiftRiver. For one, not all real-time data is online. If you're on a closed network, you can use it to process text messages received from a local gateway. This useful for users of tools like Frontline SMS or Kannell. 6. Creating a Public Aggregator One of our pilot partners used Swift to create public 'planet' style aggregator and news portal. This required some custom work from our end but we're excited for their launch. 7. Monitoring Hundreds of Blogs/Sources Perhaps you're just a person, a blogger or journalists, who consumes large amounts of information on a number of subjects, like me. I currently follow about 2000 blogs in Google Reader. Reader is extremely useful because I can aggregate whatever I want. From the aggregated datasets, I can then choose to read and share whatever I want. Likewise, in Swift having too much information is actually a good thing, there are still serendipitous ways for navigating content (using tags), as well as a number of filters for viewings items in a more structured manner. 8. Building Apps on SWS A few days a go we received a number of tweets about an app called FlipBoard, asking if Swift was anything like it. SwiftRiver is actually a very different animal. We're more like the stack that something like FlipBoard would be built on. We offer several advanced tools (social graph mining, natural language processing, location servers, twitter analytics) for free use via our open API platform Swift Web Services. Anyone can use them and thus anyone can build applications on top of them. We've been working with large media organizations around the world to customize such tools for their needs but because our stack is open, so can you! 9. Dashboard and Shared History Across Media Channels The most basic feature that makes many of the above possible is that Swift allows you to create dashboard that includes messages from a number of sources and lets you sort, search and curate them all any way you want. This might include videos, tweets, email, text messages, blogs. All of the content you have a need to mine for information, for any reason is also possible. 10. Improving Your Blog In addition to using Swift to collect research, bloggers are using Swift Web Services for their blogs. Users of Wordpress or Drupal can add features like auto-tagging and more using Swift Web Services.

These are just some of the ways our alpha testers have been using Swift, there are many more possibilities and we look forward to exploring after our Beta! To find out more about Swift, try these recent posts from Robert Scoble, the BBC and GigaOM.