UberVU lets you track and maintain conversations across the web

UberVU lets you track and maintain conversations across the web: "

UberVU, a company that tracks comments across sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Digg, recently launched the public beta test of its new data service. Now you can type any term into the uberVU site, and it lets you see how many people are discussing the term and where that conversation is happening.

At first, that probably sounds like old news, given the many other tools for tracking trends on Twitter and elsewhere. Luckily, uberVU has been paying attention to the explosion of social tracking tools as closely as you have, and has a blog post explaining how it’s different. Basically, it says it’s the tool best-focused on helping you find conversations about your company or brand, then getting you involved in those conversations.

For example, rather than “buzz tracking,” where services like Trendrr tell you how popular a topic is based on how often it’s mentioned on various social networks and services, uberVU tries to highlight conversations that you might want to join. It shows you the sites where most of the discussion is happening and highlights the most recent and most discussed topics. For example, I could do a search for “venturebeat,” see that most of the discussion is on Twitter, and also see which VentureBeat story is provoking the most tweets. Then I could chime in with my own Twitter account.

Here’s how uberVU describes the difference:

Very few people ask, “Why do we need this data? What does it help us do?” So far it seems most people use such services either for ego purposes or to do crisis management when really bad things happen. But is this all? Shouldn’t we be more proactive instead of just reacting? Our view is more long term. Marketing right now is about doing remarkable things and then participating in the conversation with your tribe and giving great customer service.

At that point, uberVU starts to sound awfully close to tools that help companies provide customer service on Twitter and elsewhere, such as CoTweet or Salesforce’s service cloud.

Previously, I’d been excited about uberVU because it provides a way for publishers to see comments about their articles from around the web. UberVU also lets sites publish those tweets and other comments back in the original article. For example, uberVU’s integration with commenting service Disqus is what allows you to see tweets mixed in with regular comments below VentureBeat articles. (Disqus integrates with both uberVU and Backtype to make this happen.) The London- and Bucharest-based startup will continue supporting these services, especially since they provide the data that powers its analytics. It eventually plans to start charging marketers for premium services.

UberVU has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding.

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