Evri Blog

We deployed our latest release last night, and it’s packed with new stuff. Here’s a rundown of the new features.

Browse
You can now browse through all of our millions of entity profile pages! Go here to find the category you are interested in, or just click a category name next to anything on the site. We have everything from Amusement Parks (there are 489 of those) to Zoos (389) and everything in between. You can add anything you want to follow in a Collection directly from the browse lists too.

Quotes & Tweets on Entity Detail Pages
Our profile pages (EDPs) have a couple new features. In addition to the new browse capabilities, you can see related tweets about the topic of the page. We use Evri to process the text of the tweets and find other relevant entities buried in the sometimes overwhelming volume of the Twitter stream.

Want to know who is saying what, about whom? Now you can with the new Quotes feature on Evri.com. You can see quotes by people, and quotes about people, places and things. We use Evri’s linguistic parsing to find quotes in the tens of thousands of sources we read every day. This very cool feature finds what people in the news are talking about and keeps it dynamically updated.



Your favorite things - to go!
Want to take your favorite things with you? Now, from any of our profile pages you can now get embed code so you can put your favorite things anywhere on the web! Perfect for blogs, home pages — anywhere you want to keep up with your interests.

Evri widget for Twitter

Collections
Our Collections feature is a whole new way for you to keep track of your interests on the web. We have given Collections a “newsfeed” view which provides content recommendations based on all the entities in your collection. We comb all our our sources to find the most compelling, up-to-date content about your collection as a whole. Collections are public, so you can easily share them around the web.

In addition, once you’re signed in, you’ll see your username linked in the top right - click this to access a list of all your collections. We added the ability to delete collections from this page as well.

Widget Gallery
In addition to the single topic widget, we also launched a new format, the Post widget. Check out this and all of our other applications here.

It’s in the API
Most of what’s above is, or will shortly be, available in our API. If you are a developer, take a look at our API docs, and please do let us know what you are building.

We want to hear from you.
Send me any feedback, comments, suggestions, ok? Please do try out the new features and let us know what you think. You can email me (neil[at]evri.com), or get to us via twitter, evri or neilr

Among my group of friends, calling oneself a fan of a band or musician is a pretty significant claim. It generally means that you can recite albums, songs, members, location of origin, etc. It’s especially gratifying to point out a hole in their knowledge, like knowing that The Clash actually had five drummers in their history or that Alex Désert, the lead singer of Hepcat once starred as a teacher on a popular TGIF sitcom.

This past week, while getting my haircut at Valentine’s, Seattle’s best barber, I found myself in a similar situation, with a rather embarrassing outcome. Valentine’s has played host to a number of music figures over the years, namely local Seattle producer Jake One and saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. As a result, discussion tends to center primarily on music.

During my past visit, my barber asked if I liked Stones Throw Records, to which I affirmed, they’ve released albums from underground hip hop fixtures like J Dilla, Madlib, and MF Doom. I was then asked if I was into Peanut Butter Wolf, to which I gave a puzzled look. I had never heard that name before. He then loudly said something about him and pointed toward someone sitting next to me about 4 feet away, who evidently was Peanut Butter Wolf. I sheepishly smiled, not knowing if I was supposed to know who was next to me.

Flash forward to about 10 minutes ago, I find the Stones Throw Records page on Evri, and notice that Peanut Butter Wolf is the top connection. It turns out that Peanut Butter Wolf, a.k.a. Chris Manak, founded Stones Throw Records in 1996. Not only did I not know the founder of a label I claimed to like, but also had the misfortune of admitting so in his presence.

On Evri, there are endless examples of interesting connections between people, places and things. Spending a little time browsing through your “favorites,” can potentially will help you avoid some serious social mishaps.