Sweeper v0.3.0 Released

Download Sweeper V0.3 Now - Click Here!

Hi all you Swiftriver and Sweeper followers out there.

The Swiftriver team is over the moon to announce the launch of our latest version of the Sweeper app.

Those of you who have been following our progress will know that this release comes hot off the heels of the V0.2 that we pushed to you all a couple of months ago.

As always, the Swiftriver guys and girls have had their heads down crafting and coding some great new features that go a long way to making Sweeper bigger and better than ever before.

So, what can you expect to see out of the V0.3 release?

The Sweeper Dashboard

Users of the new release will be greeted by a lovely shiny new dashboard that makes use of our custom built analytics module and the great jQuery graphing library jqplot [http://www.jqplot.com/] (thanks Chris for this easy to use and powerful tool). You can expect to see a lot more data visualisation in upcoming releases and we intend to utilise the power of the new analytics module throughout the Swiftriver family. 

Tag Based Navigation & Channel Based Navigation

Building our powerful tagging service, the latest version of Sweeper now offers users the ability to refine their view of content based on tags that are important to them. Simply click on any tag in the content list and see the list repopulated with only content that contains that tag!
Want to compare and cross check what people are saying on Twitter with what they are posting to flickr? Well now you can with Sweeper V0.3. The new channel based navigation filter makes it dead easy to view only content collected by a specific channel while still continuing to collect and process content from all over the web.

 

 Content Clustering

This is a great new tool that allows you to see how similar other content is to a new piece of content. Make sense? Well basically, every new piece of content that comes into Sweeper now has some scores attached to it, showing you how its set of tags match up to the larger set of tags in the system. To make this really relevant, we first show how similar this content is to all other content, then we show how similar it is to content you’ve already marked as ‘accurate’. We expect this feature to grow and grow and the Swiftriver team think this will be a key metric in the battle to cut through the noise and get down to only really interesting content.

Content Refresh Message

The new version of Sweeper keeps you updated with messages about how many new pieces of content have been collected!

As always, we didn’t manage to cram everything into this release that we would have liked to – but no worries, it just makes the next release all the more juicier!

So before I go, I can give you a little taste of some of the things you can expect to see from the next release:

  •  Revised Sweeper Panel
    We have been doing some work internally on improving the user workflow around voting on content, expect the next release to have some jazzy new buttons for you all to press!
  •  Pluggable Content Ordering Module
    Building on some of the great statistical tools we have in Sweeper already, the next release will ship with a whole new plugin framework (in addition to our Parser and Turbine models) that will allow you to change the order in which content is delivered based on things like location, RiverID score, tag clustering etc. And because it’s pluggable, you can dream up your own wild and wonderful ways of sorting the quality from the noise!

Well that really is it for now. Thanks for following our project and please get in touch if you have any issues, suggestions or would like to contribute.

Thanks as always to the Swiftriver team and our brothers and sisters over at Ushahidi for making it all possible!

Matt

Director of Platform, Swiftriver

Sweeper v0.2.0 Released

It’s been a while since our last major release of product, this is partly because we’ve been working on big projects like the Queensland Floods and our project with Product (RED), and partly because of the holiday break.  However we’re back with a ton of goodies for Sweeper users in 2011.  

We’re happy to release the newest build of SwiftRiver:Sweeper today.  Here’s a rundown of features from Director of Platform, Matthew Griffiths.


Today we are releasing the latest version of our Sweeper app!

Sweeper 0.2 doesn’t bring a whole lot of new UI wizardry but under the hood we have been beavering away at cool addition after cool addition – plus the odd fix or two for things we didn’t get quite right last time.

In short, some of the wonderful magic you can expect to see in this new release are:

Improved pre-install checks in the Installer

We know that we had some issues with our installer last time out and we have been working hard to fix them for this release. Expect to see new checks for pre-requisites and improved checks around the requirements for the Kohana framework.

Yahoo Placemaker Turbine

By activating this impulse turbine the text of any content coming into Swiftriver can be sent to the ever popular Yahoo Placemaker Service and if they mention a recognizable location then the coordinates of that location can be added to content.

Ushahidi Report Push Turbine

The first – and arguably most important – reactor turbine to be release for the Sweeper app. With the release of this Reactor Turbine you can now twin your sweeper instance with your Ushahidi instance! Something we know a lot of you out there have been waiting for!!!

A ton of new Source Parsers

Allowing users to aggregate content directly into Sweeper from all of these new sources:

  • Eventful
  • Flickr
  • FrontlineSMS
  • Google News
  • Email
  • Meetup.com

For those of you out there who are interested in the development side of Sweeper – and Swiftriver as a whole – there has been a whole host of activity that isn’t covered above. Look away now if you are easily offended by techie speak!

We have completely remodeled the presence of Swiftriver on GitHub – those of you who watch the repo will have noticed it already.

We now have separate repos for the main open source component of Swiftriver (you can find them by going to the Ushahidi page on git hub [http://www.github/Ushahidi] and looking for Sweeper, SwiftMeme, SiLCC etc.

As a consequence of this, the old SwiftRiver repo now holds only the framework files and not the individual applications. This is also the reason for the change in version numbering Sweeper and SwiftMeme are at v0.2.0 while SwiftRiver core remains at v0.6.0.

There are some complexities about working with this new repository structure but for all those dev’s out there interested in contributing to the project I will be blogging a little later this month on how exactly to get started with any of the apps.

So, I think that about all for now. Have fun with Sweeper V0.2 and as always give us your feedback if you have any!

Download Sweeper v0.2.0