Veooz: Real-time Social Media Search and Analytics Tool

India hasn't been at the forefront when it comes to social media and related technologies. We have lagged behind the rest of western world for quite a long time. Which is why Veooz comes as a breath of fresh air because it is one of the few Indian social media products that has managed to turn many heads.

What is Veooz?

Developed by Hyderabad based SETU Software Systems, Veooz is a live sentiment analysis tool. It monitors the web and helps you analyze the pulse of discussion that are revolving around a particular topic. It tries to gauge the sentiment of views shared across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, News Sites and Blogs.

How Does it Work?

As humans, we primarily gauge the sentiment of a person by their voice. So it is a puzzle as to how a machine can understand the feelings of a person. More so when the sentiments are in written form.

Explaing the sentiment analysis process of Veooz, Prasad Pingali, CEO, SETU Software says:

For each topic is that is being searched for it identifies the other dependent phrases/sentiment clues which relate to either positive or negative emotions being expressed in the post. For example anger, fear, sorrow and imperfection will be treated as negative. Similarly excitement, happiness, tenderness, perfection will be treated as positive. Some shades of humor are also treated as positive.

Rest of the updates that are neutral in nature don't get evaluated in the sentiment analysis. Only positive and negative posts are calculated.

So how does Veooz 'assign numbers' to the topics as shown above? Veooz goes through all the positive and negative updates and aggregates them. It then calculates how many of them are actually positive and how many are negative. Based on which sentiment is predominant, it will assign the value to the topic.

In the above search, of all the aggregated posts, 60% of them are negative in nature while the rest 40% are positive.

But as with every other tool out there, it falls short when it comes to sarcasm. But hey! There are people who fail to get sarcasm too!

Positives

One of the biggest plus points is that it goes beyond Facebook and Twitter. It has spread itself to Google+, Linkedin and even Blogs and News sites. Though presently it scans only the comments section of blogs/news sites, it still is a big source of important data considering how vocal people often get in comments section.

Another good thing about Veooz is that it also gives you a historical data of the sentiment. You can see how the sentiment has varied for that particular optic over a course of time. However, in the current version, the time period dynamically adjusts itself based on the activity of the topic. A highly trending topic may be shown in a smaller window, while lesser activity topic may show a longer window.

The ability to follow a topic and the listing of updates over various social media platforms are another great additions. In fact, listing of updates from influencers is a smart move! The interface itself is very easy to use.

And best of all, it's FREE!!

Scope of Improvement:

I would love if it allows to drill down and view the historical data for that particular topic. Right now, it's dynamically decided by the tool and you have no option to change the timeline for that.

Also, going through the sentiments shared in blog and news updates (in addition to comments) is something I hope they will add in the next version. The tool is still in beta. The matured version can only be awesomer!