Introducing: Five

Well folks, it’s official: Thanks to our team of brilliant programmers and awesome alpha testers, Five has launched. Now anyone with an email address can sign up and take it out for a test drive.

What’s Five all about, you ask?

Five is a social media marketing tool we built upon Bueda’s semantic analysis platform. Just tell Five what you want to promote and it will be able to understand what that thing is (whether it be a service, site, or shoe) and then give you a list of people on various social networks that would be most relevant for your message.

It’s as simple as that. Five provides you with pre-qualified leads on various social networks. Every day.

To us, creating this kind of tool just made sense. With Five, you don’t waste your time and energy telling people about something they couldn’t care less about. And odds are, the people you do tell—those people who are actually interested in what you have to say—they’ll help you to spread the word.

Watch our video to get a better idea of what Five is all about:

We currently support the Twitter platform with plans to roll out to various other social networks as soon as possible. And of course, we’ll be feverishly improving and expanding Five’s capabilities on a continual basis.

Got something to promote? A product? Event? That new YouTube video you just uploaded of your cat yawning? Try Five out for free and let us know what you think.

(Five bucks to the first person who can correctly identify the theme of our tour page.)

You may have noticed our blog’s been a little quiet in recent weeks. We promise, it’s not because we don’t love you anymore. It’s just things over here at Bueda have been getting pretty darn busy as we are in the process of launching our newest product: a little social promotion tool we like to call Five.

But today, we refuse to disappoint.

And so, to help out your mid-week doldrums, we’ve created this neat visualization depicting Bueda.com’s development from January 30-July 20, 2010 with the help of Gource. This free program displays software projects “as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its center. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project.”

For those of you who have no idea what the above paragraph is talking about, don’t worry. Even for a non-programmer, it’s still awesome to watch the Bueda team get virtually attacked by our director of development, Christopher Peplin.

And for an added bonus, the clip has been paired with trippy (royalty-free) music. 

Enjoy!

View high resolution

Inspired by Clay Shirky’s talk on How Cognitive Surplus (& social media) will Change the World

Semantic Web News

Google announced its acquisition of Metaweb, the company behind Freebase—an “open shared database of the world’s knowledge” currently hosting 12+ million entities. Google explains the move will “improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone” adding that Metaweb may help solve more complicated queries such as “colleges on the west coast with tuition under $30,000.” Google plans to further the database’s development and maintains Freebase will remain as open and free as it was before its acquisition. Read More.

MySpace adds a GetGlue app, described as a “light integration” that will help users display their entertainment tastes directly on their profile. Adding this social and semantic recommendation service is an attempt of the site to jump on the SemWeb bandwagon after Facebook (who recently reached the 500 million user mark) added Open Graph protocol markup to each public page on their network so they can identify companies, musicians, celebrities, etc). Read More.

Researchers in Madrid have developed a tool that simplifies the use of the semantic web so individuals untrained in the technologies can still work together to reap its benefits. The new tool, Fortunata, can be used by developers, graphic designers, and end users to create web applications that use and generate semantic data. Read More.

SemanticWeb.com just published this great article listing out 7 Signs that the Semantic Web is going mainstream. Among the seven? RDFa Adoption By Search & Social Media Giants, Semantic Ecommerce, VC Funded Exits, BioPharma Makes Enterprise Software Take Ontology Seriously, and RDFa Momentum Pulls Support For Higher Level Standards. Read More.

Photo via Flickr/Sudhamshu

Franktuary Gets Social, Goes Mobile

This belongs to a series of posts profiling local Pittsburgh companies & organizations that use social media in effective and innovative ways. (Read the post introducing the series here.)

For those unfamiliar with this Pittsburgh staple, Franktuary is the gourmet hotdog shop located downtown in the basement of the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. Since its 2004 debut, the restaurant’s delicious fare and eccentric atmosphere (picture da Vinci’s Mona Lisa…with a hotdog) has gained it widespread kudos and attention both on and off-line. The hotdog shop’s latest endeavor involves leveraging its virtual presence to grow its physical one.

Co-owners Megan Lindsey & Tim Tobisch (via Flickr)

Read More