Big time multi-tasker

Twitter just acquired a bunch of top-notch Silicon Alley engineering talent with their purchase of real time search firm Julpan, adding about a dozen staffers, including some high level Xooglers. The company also opened up an official NYC office a few months back.

Now they are making New York part of their whistle stop developer tour, hosting a Twitter "Tea Time" at betaworks with some help from the folks at SocialFlow.

"There’s a lot going on in the ecosystem and we’d like to take this chance to share the highlights with you - including the latest developments with the platform, areas of opportunity that we’re seeing, and a heavy focus on the iOS 5 Twitter integration for developers," wrote Twitter's Jason Costa. "We’ll also be holding a Q&A session with members of the platform team, plus time to hang out with each other."

Over time betaworks, which focuses on the real-time web, has become closely aligned with a big part of the Twitter ecosystem. It's bit.ly links count for a big percentage of shortened links on Twitter and Tweetdeck has now been acquired and integrated directly into Twitter. Now they are actively helping the company to build a better relationship with NY's developer community.

Socialflow is a betaworks company that works no the science of real-time information. Today they tried to answer an interesting question that media types have been pondering from the human angle. "Keith Urbahn wasn’t the first to speculate Bin Laden’s death, but he was the one who gained the most trust from the network. Why did this happen?"

Gilad Lotan, who recently left Microsoft to become VP of R&D at Socialflow, worked with programmer Devin Gaffney to analyze 14.8 million public tweets and bit.ly links. Their analysis led them to conlcude that, "Before May 1st, not even the smartest of machine learning algorithms could have predicted Keith Urbahn’s online relevancy score, or his potential to spark an incredibly viral information flow. While politicos “in the know” certainly knew him or of him, his previous interactions and size and nature of his social graph did little to reflect his potential to generate thousands of people’s willingness to trust within a matter of minutes."

Earlier in the night, when news broke that President Obama would be making a surprise, late night appearance on television, there were others who speculated that it must be the death of Osama bin Laden. But they didn't make a convincing case and the speculation didn't spread.

After Keith Urbahn made his now famous declaration, it was retweeted by New York Times reporter Brian Stelter. As you can see in this marvelous graphic, they form the two central nodes from which the information spread. Without that second affirmation, it's possible the news would have stayed speculative until much later, perhaps until the White House decided to officially confirm.

The whole report is over at Socialflow's blog and really worth checking out.

There have been a number of posts recently that have gotten a lot of attention about timing in social media. Like great orators of old, or famous lover through the ages, top tweeters do possess an innate sense for when to deliver the goods.

Mashable ran a story citing research that showed tweets and status updates were more likely to get traction among a wide audience on Thursday and Friday, when folks are checking out of work and looking for a distraction.

"The idea that you can tell people, this is a good time to tweet, is just wrong," says Frank Speiser, CEO of Socialflow. "Trying to predict the best time to engage users is a losing battle, because its all about relating to the real time conversation."

What users really need, and what Socialflow is selling, is a deep understanding of the windows that do open, when a tidal mass of users are primed to pay attention to a certain topic. "One second people may be talking about Obama, or a sports game,  but then the tsunami hits in Japan, and everything turns to a discussion of nuclear energy and policy."

With full access to the Twitter and bit.ly firehose, Socialflow is seeing a massive stream of information at any given moment. "The issues may be big, but the best way to engage people is still to talk to them as if you were engaging a small group."

So while a user might care about Def Leppard playing in Long Island in July, and who doesn't really, when someone comes on TV and announces a massive spike in layoffs, they probably care a lot less and that news may even impact their inclination to be engaged by paying for a concert.