Evri Blog

Check out our new sentiment widget. You can select your favorite topic to seed the widget. Then just select your blogging platform, or grab the code, and embed it onto your web site or blog. Your readers can then get an up to the minute assessment of how the web feels about your topic.

If your topic is Barack Obama, for example, your readers can see that 38% of the web feels positively about him, and 62% of the web is expressing negative sentiment about him. You can also see who Barack Obama’s top critics and praisers are, and then explore exactly what they are saying about the president. Play around with the drop down boxes to get different sentiment expressions found on the web and as always, please do send us your feedback.

On a final note, the Evri sentiment widget is built using our sentiment API which you can read all about in this blog post titled Sentiment API Exposes Web’s Feelings.

Last week we had our first ever Evri Holiday Hackathon. A bunch of us locked ourselves into a hotel for a couple days and hacked away on our laptops building new apps using Evri’s API. It was a blast; we ate great food, hacked great code, and lots of wonderful applications came out. At the end of the contest, all present voted on their favorite app.

This year, 3rd place went to Seth and Phil for a great game called Connected to Whom. Second place went to Arun who created an engaging music browsing mashup. And the winners were Carsten and Satish who built an Evri Twitter widget that plugs into our entity detail pages; whenever you go to an Evri page about an entity (person, place or thing), the Evri Twitter widget uses Twitter to find the most recent buzz (tweets in Twitter-speak) about that entity. In addition, the Evri Twitter widget automatically identifies other entities present in tweets and prepares links to other Evri entity pages. The result is an entertaining way to surf through the entity web while riding the latest buzz wave.

You can try it out. You’ll need to install GreaseMonkey onto your Firefox browser (sorry, no other browser support yet) in case you don’t already have it. Then click HERE to install the widget. Finally, take it out for a spin at www.evri.com and go to your favorite entity page; the tweets are shown just below the videos. Here is a screenshot:

We hope to open our Hackathon contest up publicly sometime next year, and we’d love to see you all there. In the mean time, check out our API, build some great stuff, and tell us all about it on the Evri API Group page. And on a final note, here’s a slideshow from the Hackathon:

We have made it possible now for those of you in the Beta Preview to see how the first version of the Evri widget works. If you go to the main beta page you will find a list of three recent news headlines at the bottom of the page. Click on one of these to display the article, then click on the large banner in the middle of the page.

We have also made it a bit easier to get to Evri Profile Pages from the Home page and elsewhere. Based on your feedback, we realized that this was a bit opaque… We have some bigger changes coming at the end of this sprint, but for now, we have added a simple way to go directly to a Person, Place, or Thing’s Profile Page. Just look for the small Evri icon next to the name, and click! You get right to where you wanted to go.