Insttant - making sense of the real-time Web

TC50 - Insttant gives you a comprehensive overview of Twitter's real-time stream

As people Tweet away on Twitter, a wealth of content is being created, streams of all sorts of information like what's getting read, which videos are being viewed, what news is the most shared, what celebrity is being talked about, and plenty more emerge and decay organically across this new, real-time Web.

One of the problems with Twitter is that it doesn't do a great job of turning this stream of public updates into usable data.  That's where Insttant says it can come in, a start-up which presented at the TC50 conference in San Francisco yesterday afternoon.  

How the product works is quite interesting.  Insttant taps into Twitter's massive stream to let users search and analyze what's happening on the real-time Web.  Insttant then compiles these results into detailed analytics including sentiment, user analysis and real time headlines.  The demo presented at TC50 shows all sorts of neat graphs and ways in which Twitter data is displayed.

Dick Costolo, COO of Twitter sat on the board of panelists commenting on the startup, and said this sort of product would be great for marketers and advertisers, looking to analyze perhaps how people across the Web are responding to a particular campaign. 

Another key feature to Insttant is its ability to narrow down results of Tweets, based on location, of which could be of interest to marketers.   

Robert Scoble, a well-known blogger, mentioned that he liked the approach, but a user's number of followers on Twitter has nothing to do with interest.  He would love to see a deeper look at engagement scores among Tweets.

In response to Scoble's comment, Joe Langevin, CEO of Insttant said that while his product eliminates real noise, it also basis its results on "ReTweet's", which can signify which Tweet's are more engaging among Tweeters.