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Two new sites are offering themselves up as hubs of all things Boston. One is tracking Beantown’s Twitter memes; the other is mapping the Bay State’s high-tech economy by aggregating job postings, company profiles, news feeds and influential tech blogs in one place.
Happn.in, a site based in Amherst, now tracks frequently mentioned phrases on the microblog-sharing site Twitter in 88 cities, says co-founder Jay Boice. He launched Happn.in in April, tracking memes on the micro-blogging service in two cities: Boston and San Francisco.
Meanwhile, Venturefizz.com is in its first full day live on the web today. The site, assembled by tech recruiter Keith Cline, proposes to bring together news, job postings and web chatter on all things related to infotech, media and consumer technology companies in Massachusetts –- along with a database of tech companies operating in the area.
“There are a lot of information sources -– like Mass High Tech, for example –- but there’s no place that brings all these things together,” said Cline. The site will include active job listings from clients of his company, Dissero LLC, which fills postings at the manager or director level and above in Massachusetts IT companies. Cline is based in Philadelphia, but works with clients in Massachusetts and New York.
Cline, who funded Venturefizz’s development himself, said he hopes to add features as it grows in popularity.
Happn.in began as a personal project, said Boice, a networks and databases consultant at Amherst-based Pomelo LLC. “I kind of was curious to see what people were talking about,” he said. He and web consultant Matt Latkiewicz put the site together, and recently added advertising.
At this point, revenue from the site is paying their living expenses, he said. Across all its cities, the service has 180,000 Twitter followers, and is growing at a rate of about 2,000 to 3,000 a day, he said.
The site picks the top-trending phrases from users whose profiles list a Boston location. Every hour, a list of posts using those phrases go up on happn.in/boston, and a tweet goes out from @happn_in_boston listing the trending terms. The site also identifies the “trend setter,” who first used the term on Twitter.
Happn.in relies on an automated engine that compares the percentage of Twitter users posting a phrase over the past hour, as compared to that phrase’s use over the past week, Boice explained. “Thinks like ‘Monday morning’ just get knocked out,” he said. They also have a blacklist of very common phrases, and a blacklist of spambot Twitter users.
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