Internet Media Labs today announced the launch of oneQube SmartStream, a free Twitter chat platform designed to support the hundreds of active Twitter chats that were rocked by this week’s news about the imminent demise of TweetChat, a popular chat client that will soon stop working as a result of Twitter’s latest API changes. The SmartStream team says their platform is fully compatible with the new Twitter API rules.
SmartStream is part of the oneQube SocialRM platform, which is currently in private beta. In light of the TweetChat announcement, the company has decided to make SmartStream immediately available as a free platform to support the Twitter chat community. “As active chat participants ourselves, we felt compelled as a company to help support the thousands of thriving chat communities that rely on TweetChat to power their Twitter chats,” said Peter Bordes, CEO and Founder of Internet Media Labs.
The SmartStream application is similar to TweetChat, but offers some additional features that create an even more robust chat experience. After authenticating your Twitter account and creating a oneQube account with a short registration, you can then focus the timeline to a Twitter chat hashtag. A dedicated, moveable Tweet box lets you send tweets with the hashtag automatically added. You can retweet, and highlight or block specific users. Unique features allow you to reply to all, include a shortened link in your tweet, and hover over chat participants or links to see information about them.
SmartChat also includes a feature designed to help users navigate extremely active chats. The default user setting is Queue mode, which displays tweets in a manner similar to how they appear in native Twitter or Hootsuite. A blue counter bar at the top indicates how many tweets are waiting for you to view, you can click on the blue bar to release the tweets pending in the queue. A line separator shows where you last released tweets into the stream, making it easy for you to keep track of your place in an active chat with a high volume of tweets per minute. In Stream mode, tweets will load as they are presented, and in very fast chats this will mode will be hard to follow.
You can also highlight tweets from a particular participant: selecting “highlight” from the “Qubit” menu for a particular user will highlight that user’s tweets for the duration of the chat. And when you are @mentioned in a chat, those tweets will be highlighted as well.
Realtime Chat Analytics, Built-In Transcripts
There is also a proprietary Social Analytics, Real Time (#SART) panel that lets chat participants see who is tweeting the most in the chat, what other hashtags are trending in the chat, and what links are being shared, all without leaving the stream — something that chat moderators are sure to love. And — super exciting if you are a chat geek — SmartStream includes a transcript on demand functionality that lets you save a full transcript of the chat you just participated in, which will be permanently archived in your transcripts for future reference. SmartStream lets you save as many chat transcripts as you want.
Link Previews, User Profiles
The company has incorporated some of oneQube’s more advanced features into SmartStream that make it easy to find relevant content and build relationships with other chat participants. Hover over any link in a SmartStream, and a window displays a mini-preview box of the content on the other side of the link.
You can also hover over any Twitter handle to get a mini-preview of that persons Twitter bio:
From this box, clicking the “Profile Plus” icon on lower left brings up a box for that includes recent Tweets, that users trends (who they are talking to, who is talking at them, and what hashtags they participate in), as well as a website summary if they happen to have a link in their bio. A blue corner in the box means you are following that person already, a red corner means you are not — click on the corner to start following that person.
SmartStream is part of the multi-functional Social Relationship Management platform, oneQube, which is currently in private beta. oneQube will be a paid platform, and SmartStream users will be able to get a peek at oneQube’s features by clicking on the left navigation bar. The company says its goal is to have oneQube fully available for use, with a generous free trial period, by the end of June. SmartStream users may also ask to become part of the private beta, with those requests being honored on a first-come, first-served basis.
I’m sure many people will be trying SmartStream out in the coming week — let us know what you think!
