The more I use Twitter, the more I wish that Scoopler already existed! As the list of people I follow grows, I seem to increasingly turn a blind eye to the high profile twitterers, who seem to post the most frequently. This is ironic, considering the reason I am following these guys is so that I can keep track of the latest tech news, and the freshest memes. The problem is that only about 1 in 10 of these posts is interesting to me. In contrast I read my (actual) friend’s tweets religiously.

Speaking to a few twitter users, I know that this problem isn’t unique to me. There’s also been some recent talk in the blogosphere of twitter spam increasing and developers have been quick to realise that there is a need to organise the Twitter information better. Quotably, Tweetmeme, TweetScan, AlphaTwitter and more recently Twitlinks are all websites which aim to make sense of the tweetosphere. But, what does this all have to do with Scoopler? Well, we are currently working on a prototype of Scoopler which will begin to tackle this problem.

We had been trying to work out what the essence of Scoopler is over the last few weeks, the feature that made it really unique, which we can demonstrate easily as a prototype running on top of the Twitter API. Two features really stood out:

1) A location focused service which shows a user a events in their location and the tweets about those events. The service would connect people who are sharing the same experience of an event, so that they can discuss it via microblogging as it happens.

2) A Digg like website for the microblogosphere where users can highlight posts about interesting events in real time. As Mike Arrington points out, Twitter is already a great source of breaking news, because the real time nature of microblogging means information is dispersed faster than via blogging and mainstream media.

Option (1) is a bottom up approach to Scoopler, and is actually the path Buzzspotr, a service created by London based startup i-Together, is taking. Buzzpotr was featured on TechCrunch UK last month, when the service was mothballed, but I have been in touch with Jof recently, who has assured me that they’re working on resuscitating it. Given that we have just under a week to put together a prototype to demo, when we’re in the valley, building a location based service seemed a little too ambitious! So, we decided to go for Option 2, with the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid) principle in mind. Building a Digg for the microblogsphere was actually our original idea, so after a month of Biz Dev it’s good to know that we haven’t lost sight of our vision. The prototype will run on top of the Twitter API, as well as plugging in to Twitter’s public stream via Jabber.

How will it work?

When you are twittering and you want to share a piece of news like a product launch, you “scoop” your post and it appears on Scoopler’s front page. Scoopler users can rate scoops and comment on them. We forward those comments back to you on Twitter and if you like someone else’s post you can scoop it too. If your post is rated highly and there’s a lot of discussion about it, it will stay on the front page. The aim is to create a source for breaking news, especially experiences of events as they happen. We’re working out the mechanics of how scooping a post will work but its going to be dead easy, I promise! To make sure we don’t lose sight of what we want to achieve, we actually put together some mock-ups of what Scoopler might look like. Check out the homepage and the page for an individual scoop and tell me what you think.

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I was going to post this last week but we hadn’t secured the domain name yet and then I forgot! Here it is nonetheless:

Dilan and I have been doing lots of brainstorming over the last couple of weeks and among the ideas we have looked at, one really stood out: The vision we have is to provide a microblogging platform for discovering, sharing and discussing events and news.

Ok, so that sounds like pretty blue sky thinking. What we want to do is provide an events aggregation website with the added feature of being able to microblog about a specific event you are attending. This idea spawned from all the Twittering that has been going on during SXSW. Our line of thought was that maybe there’s a better way to collect all the twitters about an event like the infamous key note by Zuckerberg, so everyone can join the discussion on a single thread. You can kind of do this on twitter, by using hashtags and tracking them, or setting up a user account for the event and @replying to that user, but twitter isn’t events focused, which is beauty of it - you can twitter about anything.

We came up with a working title - “Scoopler.com”:

With this new idea to work with, we did some more networking and threw it out to the usual OpenCoffee crowd in order to get some feedback…

So far so good - we did a bit of tweaking and everyone we have spoken to thinks the idea has some legs, including some potential investors. We even managed to (somewhat unintentionally) land our first pitch on Thursday, with Promethyan Labs, a seed fund that “has just recently been established to work with ambitious young entrepreneurs to help them build great companies” in the words of Rupesh, one of the partners. The pitch went very smoothly considering it was our first one!

–UPDATE–

I finished the first version of our Business Plan last week but it was a bit too long so we’re trying to boil it down to 10 pages. We also just submitted our application to Y Combinator, which is a seed fund that give startups the initial capital and guidance they need to turn an idea into a company. Auctomatic and Snaptalent are two UK companies who have gone through YC already and have been given some great opportunites as a result. In fact, last week, Auctomatic announced that they have been acquired by Live Current Media for $5M in cash and shares - Congrats to Kulveer, Harjeet and Patrick. It just goes to show there’s hope for us all!

Next up: Mini-seedcamp on Friday… I really need to start blogging more regularly again.

P.S. My twitter is @AJisThinking.

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