Topicurious: A Brief History in Time

Versions 1 and 2: Early prototypes

The first versions of Topicurious were basic prototypes. The product started out simply as a search engine for keyword or topic-related hashtags on Twitter. When I started using Twitter in 2008 I quickly fell in love with hashtags, not only to consume information on a topic, but also to post tweets to relevant hashtag streams in order to expand my social reach.

The randomness of hashtags frustrated me, so we built a tool to find all the trending hashtag streams based on search keywords.

The feedback we received about Version 1 and 2 from users was good. We learned that not only is it useful to find all the keyword-relevant hashtags, but users were also quickly discovering interesting people and content they wouldn't normally come across. So, we decided to build out some additional features to make it easier and faster to do just that: find topic-related people and content.

Version 3: First MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

Here are the highlights of some of the features we added in Version 3 based on feedback from users and our own ideas:

• saved searches
• folders (or groups)
• tweet stream keyword filters
• sorting by # of followers
• show tweets with links
• hide retweets
• user profile
• user tweets
• user hashtags

Again, we received positive comments from users. The people who use Topicurious more than once tell us that they really like it and it has become an "indispensable tool".

However, we discovered a problem; most people were only using Topicurious occasionally. The main feature of Topicurious, searching for keyword-relevant hashtags, doesn't solve a problem most Twitter users believe they have everyday. The other problem was the app wasn't mobile-friendly, which is where most Twitter activity takes place. So it wasn't easy enough for people to jump into the app on their phones when they were spending time on Twitter.

In the end, the users who don't tend to use it everyday, simply forget to use it. As soon as they see or hear from us, they're reminded of how they "really need to use Topicurious more often!" 

Version 3 was not disruptive enough to get the kind of user traction we wanted.

Version 4: Coming soon...

Our mission with the next version of Topicurious is very different than before. Up to this point, the focus of the tool has been to help find keyword-related hashtags, people, and content.

We've decided that there's a much bigger, more common, and more frequent problem that most Twitter users have every single time they log into Twitter on their mobile device or on the web...

The noise. It's overwhelming.

The noise causes a many problems and frustrations for Twitter users:

• They waste too much time reading tweets they're not interested in.
• It's too time consuming to build new relationships with people on Twitter because there's too much noise to sift through.
• Conceptually, Twitter lists have potential to reduce noise, but it hasn't proven to be true. Even Lists are FAR too noisy.

Our mission for Topicurious V4 is to provide a tool that filters out the noise and helps Twitter users spend more time reading tweets they're interested in and proactively engaging with more people in less time.

Here are some of the cool features we'll be releasing soon...

• Clickable word cloud of topics being discussed in your Home timeline or your Twitter Lists
• Trending hashtags happening in your own Home timeline and your Twitter Lists
• Ability to quickly scan the stream of "people" tweeting without having to waste time reading all the text of their tweets