4AM DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY LABS - BLOG

About seven months ago, before the launch of the closed beta version of Vamooz we spent days trying to finalize the products feature list. The debates that raged around this issue were elaborate ( eg: Person 1: I like this feature, lets include it; Person 2 : I don’t like it; Person 3 :Guys, is it true that if a plane flies low over a penguin, the penguin keeps trying to look at the plane till it falls over? ).

After numerous debates we established that the penguin does not fall over. This however did not bring us any closed to finalizing our feature list. What these debates did establish however was that it would be best to let our users decide what the final feature list should be.

With this in mind the closed beta of Vamooz was launched in early December of last year. The response we got was simply overwhelming. Hundreds of users signed up to test Vamooz and gave us extensive feedback, on everything from the features that they would like to what they thought about our color scheme.

Based on this feedback and what we learnt from the experience of building the earlier version of Vamooz we set out to build a version of Vamooz that would better meet our users needs. We are currently in the process of updating Vamooz to this new version. Over the next couple of weeks we will take down the existing version of Vamooz, upload the new one and then make sure the new version is working fine. Unfortunately Vamooz will not be available during this time.

During this time you can keep track of our progress right here on the 4am blog or if you are the twitter types you can follow us @vamooz.

We have just set up the Vamooz Blog, which provides daily updates on the most read Vamooz stories, giving you a brand new way to find interesting news stories.

Check out the Vamooz Blog and tell us what else you would like.

Vamooz Blog

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Please note that the information provided by the Vamooz Blog is automatically collated without human intervention. For a detailed account of how 4am treats user information please see the 4am Privacy Policy.

After a little more than a month in closed Beta, Vamooz currently tracks thirty news sources categorized into close to three hundred ‘moozes’. What this translates into is the the tracking, by Vamooz, of just over half a million news stories from across the world.

We recently took some time off from doing whatever it is that we do ( such as this and this ) and decided to see what the media is actually talking about. Some of the trends we found were as expected and others were not! Here is a quick look into what we found just so the impatient have something to play with before we add this to Vamooz itself!

First off, the Google story:

Google VS Yahoo VS Microsoft - the media glare

Notice that between the 30th of November and the 5th of December Google dropped its advertising partnership with Yahoo and decided against any possibility of an acquisition – This left Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang with no option but to step down and re-opened the possibility of a previously canned acquisition by Microsoft. Its interesting that the same events have given Google almost twice the publicity as Microsoft or Yahoo. Granted Google could have been up to other things but the significant difference is indeed noteworthy.

Moving on to some politics:

Obama VS Mccain VS Hilary - News stories over time

Most spikes in this graph are expected – however its quite unexpected that the number of news stories related to Hilary Clinton when she was announced as a possible candidate for the post of ’secretary of state’ is more than six times that of when she was actually made the secretary of state.

And finally some cricket:

Dhoni VS Sachin VS Yuvraj

Almost as expected execpt that it would have been nice to know which got more publicity – Dhoni applying for a gun licence or him threatening to quit.

It must be noted that the number of sources grew over the given time period.. Although this should not affect the comparisons, it might have some effect on the overall number of stories related to a topic over time.

DISCLAIMER: This article displays some preliminary data from Vamooz, which despite our best efforts might have errors. The author of this article has, in some places, given his interpretation of this data. These opinions are in no way the official views of 4am Design and Technology Labs. This post should be seen more as an exploration into improving the functionality of Vamooz rather than one that analyses the media.