I’ve been travelling a lot lately and have attended a number of conferences at which the latest range of buzzwords are clearly being utilized by a new crop of startups. At the same time I’ve been railing against excessive use of acronyms that does nothing to make life easier for consumers and, in fact, confuses all but a small circle of cognoscenti.

So when I got a press release from Mesagraph the other day about their launch today of a service that leverages “social semantic search and next generation big data analytics”, I choked a little bit. But fair being fair, I wanted to dive in and see what Mesagraph is actually about. From the release;

Mesagraph unlocks the value of social media to help organizations and individuals make faster, better decisions. Mesagraph is a real-time search and discovery platform for social media.

Its premier Web-based application, Meaningly allows individuals and organizations to gain meaningful insights from Twitter for crisis mitigation, trend identification, CRM, product marketing and helps you stay on top of your interests.

Mesagraph’s pull engine, aggregates, annotates and enriches social content with some of the largest online knowledge resources in the world. Proprietary Mesagraph algorithms transform the petabytes of social media data into results you can use. Results that deliver a perfect match for personalized recommendations and unique analytics, in a timely manner.

In other words, Mesagraph pulls data from a bunch of different sources, crunches it up and spits out something meaningful to let organizations find insights into entities. Their first application, Meaningly, gives users contextually sensitive and personalize recommendations for topics of interest. If you want to get an instant infographic about products that are made in Japan, about CEOs of companies headquartered in California or late-2000s financial crisis , for example, Mesagraph would gather that for you in real-time.

Now don’t get me wrong, this sort of service is super valuable – it helps make sense of the noise that increases daily from the myriad of information sources that exist in the world. But by articulating their offering in this way, Mesagraph has fallen to the temptation which is all to common, to jump on the trend du jour and launch based on buzzwords rather than plain English. It makes one wonder whether the tools being created are for the real world or purely for the enjoyment of a technology elite.

In a similar area is another company, Marketscout that is also mapping a large electronic footprint and attempting to make sense out of it. The messaging of the two companies however is subtly different, and it will interest me to see what that means when it comes to commercial success in the real world.

Either way Mesagraph looks interesting, and I’m looking forward to using the product. I just hope the buzzword use doesn’t limit the potential for what should be an awesome product.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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