PeerIndex – making sense of unstructured data

Greetings from OpenView Venture Partners, a Boston venture capital firm (actively searching for expansion stage software and technology companies!! If that is you – call me!)

On my daily (let’s be real.. hourly) scan of TechCrunch, I came across an extremely interesting post about structuring and pulling out the most relevant information from social networks and especially twitter. Currently, you can follow trends of what is happening and what is being talked about, but most tweets are essentially noise or being written by people who may not be experts or frankly by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could easily pick out the experts, the people who spend their lives researching the topics you are interested in and are excited about the development? Viewsflow, the current demonstration site of PeerIndex (which hasn’t launched yet), is doing just that.

Viewsflow identifies and ranks experts in various fields based on their digital footprints and real activity. The idea is to build a topic based database and index the experts on various these topics based on what they share on twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, etc. Many of the top venture capital firms have been trying to figure out a way to make money on these sites for a couple years and this could be the real winner (think subscriptions/downloads/videos to the smartest people’s personal thoughts and ideas on extremely targeted topics).

There are many “twitteresque” companies out there tracking information, but I haven’t come across one quite like this that is able to draw real conclusions and provide valuable info. The Library of Congress has recently announced that they will be archiving all public tweets forever… You have to admit, it will be quite interesting in 50 years for my grandchildren to be able to get a snapshot of march 2010, what was going on, what people cared about and (if I’m lucky) what their 74 year old Grandma had to say about it!