Check out this app: BookVibe

bookvibe.com

By Alex Dalenberg

July 28, 2013 

Here's an app that not only manages to make sense of Twitter, but also generates great reading recommendations: BookVibe.  

What BookVibe does is simple. It pulls together tweets about books from the people you follow on Twitter. Connect your account and BookVibe bubbles up tweets about new books, old books, any books really. What makes it more powerful than a search is that the app can tell when people are talking about  a book in way that implies a recommendation. Similar to LinkedIn, you can also follow thought leaders who are tweeting about books, like famous authors and business leaders. If you see a recommendation you like, a link takes you to more information about the book.

All in all, it's a pretty amazing way to surface conversations about culture. You can see how the technology could be applied to movies, plays, fashion and other products. Of course, the real business upside here is what BookVibe (developed by a company called Parakweet) can tell brands about social media chatter. I've seen a lot of low-cost tools that attempt to measure how actual humans are talking about a product or company (something called sentiment analysis) and this is one of the best by far.

But for our book blog purposes, BookVibe is just a neat way to tap into literary chatter on social media without having to spend time digging through lists or timelines. The other ingenious trick is the way it turns Twitter (at least while you're using the app) into a social network for discussing books. There are whole communities on the Web dedicated to this (GoodReads, for example), but they require setting up a new profile, finding your friends and then remembering to use it. BookVibe takes the social network you already have in place and helps you use it for something new. 

Check it out.