Cloze

Let's not call Cloze a social media aggregator, even though you could easily mistake it for one, because what it does is much smarter than just putting a lot of disparate conversations onto one page. Rather, the Web app Cloze takes a three-step approach to sifting through your online relationships to highlight people who are most relevant to you and bring greater context to their digital communication. ?

Here's how the three-step approach plays out: First, Cloze collects communication from various channels: LinkedIn, email, Twitter, and Facebook. Second, Cloze aggregates all those tweets and messages per person by day, letting you see, for example, every status update and LinkedIn post a client or your boss wrote today. Third, Cloze displays the per-person list of activity in a prioritized order based on that person's importance to you. This last part relies on a Cloze score, which is loosely similar to a Klout score. You can override the algorithm and mark anyone you want as a "key" contact to make sure you see their updates.

The system succeeds in adding context to online communication, which would be otherwise lost in just about any similar tool, such as HootSuite and the now unsupported but not quite dead Tweetdeck. Those two tools perform several functions that Cloze does not, however, so they aren't direct competitors. Both Tweetdeck and HootSuite let you keep an eye on messages directed right at you, whereas Cloze focuses on activity from important people regardless of whether they're trying to get your attention. But as with Tweetdeck and HootSuite, Cloze does let you "talk back" or respond to the activity you see from within the interface. A clean selection of response modes changes based on whether you're reading a tweet, Facebook status update, LinkedIn post, or email message. As much as I definitely see the value in using Cloze, I think it could be even better if it stole?er, "borrowed" some features from social media aggregators.

How Cloze Works
From the website Cloze.com you can sign up for a free Cloze account and authenticate access to your various social networks and email accounts. While you can connect multiple email accounts, and even multiple accounts from the same provider (e.g., two Gmail accounts), you can only connect one of each kind of social network, i.e., one Facebook account, one Twitter, one LinkedIn.

Cloze then analyzes all the communication you've had with various people across the systems you've initialized and assigns each of your contacts a score indicating the person's importance to you. People with the highest scores become your Key People, although you can customize who is and isn't among these VIPs. Cloze discloses a lot of information about its scoring algorithm, saying it takes into account dormancy (which measures the last time you and the person communicated), frequency (how often you two communicate), responsiveness (how quickly you respond to one another), privacy (how many of your conversations are private versus public), freshness (how often conversations cover new topics versus use the same language over and over), and balance (that is to say, two-way relationships).

Scores update daily, and you can see readouts of each person's score. It includes the breakdown of the score across the various factors, as well as information about whether the total score has increased or decreased since the prior day. A graph plotted over time even shows whether the person's monthly average score has shifted.

From the home page, Cloze shows you a summary of all the communication activity for the day by person. Key people rank highest, so you'll see their emails, tweets, and other social interactions first. The site is easy to navigate and very clearly arranged. A mute button lets you remove a person from this feed, which I found helpful for silencing people who post very frequently on Twitter in particular.

You can also interact with the updates coming from your network directly from the Cloze home page. A little wheel of options pops into view when you click to interact with someone, and the choices (such as reply, like, mark as favorite) change based on what kind of communication you're viewing. Cloze also has a check mark option for noting when you have already interacted with some activity and want to now remove it from the feed.

Hits the Nail on the Head
Between the customization options for adjusting Key People and the ability to interact right from my Cloze account, I felt like Cloze really did hit the nail on the head for increasing the relevancy and context of activity from my social network. Before using Cloze, I didn't even realize how much of this context and relevancy was lost on me. It's often extremely useful to be able to see someone's latest tweet paired next to her latest Facebook update and latest comment she made on someone else's update.

Although Cloze isn't a social media aggregator in the same way that Tweetdeck and HootSuite are, I think it would easily become my social media app of choice if it added a few features found in those app, such as the ability to schedule posts and tweets and get alerts of mentions and incoming message. It's a wonderful app designed for anyone who uses social media as part of their job, or who has a rich social life online.?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/xtzoeGWRNz4/0,2817,2418290,00.asp

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