Enterprise Friendly Social Network Dashboard PeopleBrowsr Launches Real-Time Search

by editor on Jul.10, 2009, under TechCrunch

PeopleBrowsr, a desktop and web browser-based dashboard for social networks, is adding a real-time search functionality that would let users make filtered searches into conversations on Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.

Launched at TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream CrunchUp, the search engine is particularly useful to brands and companies looking to have insight into the conversations about their businesses taking place on the social graph. Designed to unearth conversations around particular keywords, the search engine also offers further filtering options. Search results can be filtered by topic, geography and authority.

PeopleBrowsr’s technology crawls a plethora of data from social networks, including links in messages, Twitter bios, authority (determined by number of followers), real-time trending topics, and sentiment. PeopleBrowsr then lets users directly engage with the people who appear in the search results across multiple social networks via public response, personal direct messages, retweets, and reposts.

As I wrote in my earlier review of the desktop client, PeopleBrowsr’s client is targeted towards use in the enterprise space, which is smart considering the current rat race in the Twitter client arena. I’m sure the real-time capabilities only make PeopleBrowsr’s offering more appealing to brand managers or clients. PeopleBrowsr’s “Smart Cache” real-time indexes high volumes of conversations (1,000 new posts per second) and trends them into 1 minute, 10 min or 1 hr increments. Results are also embeddable, allowing users to integrate results in a widget to be placed in reports or posts.

There’s no doubt that with the companies, restaurants, brands and celebrities all using Twitter and Facebook as business platforms that real-time, powerful search across these networks will be a boon to brand managers and communications teams. Startup ViralHeat also crawls the web, Twitter and video sites for real-time mentions of keywords but doesn’t yet have capabilities for Facebook and FriendFeed.