The Need

The rise of social media and subsequent addition of thousands of content sources has left many scrambling to make sense of all the information available. Not only are millions of citizens and consumers talking on the web, but an increasing amount of business is being conducted on social media sites. With lots of small audiences, it's hard to gauge credibility. Many voices are talking at once in a variety of different ways and trying to track them without an integrated tool is next to impossible.

Drupal has been a leader in bringing cutting edge tools to bear, in areas like Semantic Web, APIs and open government. The culmination of some of this work is a Semantic news and topic monitoring tool, Tattler. It is a powerful tool that helps a user navigate this ever-expanding universe of information.

The Objective

We see Tattler as an opportunity to increase Drupal's visibility within important sectors like publishing, journalism, non-profit, and public policy organizations where we hope for and expect a wide group of adopters.

We believe having a product roadmap is important to understand our vision and plans for the future of Tattler. We have four proposed versions of Tattler as outlined below. We foresee Tattler evolving and improving through each version and beyond.

ALPHA Release

Timeframe: July - August 2009
Audience: Product team (internal QA & testing)

Purpose: Complete initial product development and prepare a BETA release for community review.

BETA: Private Community Release

Timeframe: Late August - October 2009

Available: Downloads and hosted trials by invitation-only.
Audience: Select group of targeted beta testers. The pilot group has been selected to include thought-leaders and strategists in the following disciplines: social media; journalists and editors; public policy researchers and analysts and technical community reviewers.
Purpose: The pilot group will provide feedback on the product in preparation for community distribution.

Version 1.0: Community Public Release

Timeframe: October
 2009
Available: Version 1.0 will be available by October 15, 2009 and released on Drupal.org for community review/download

Audience: Drupal community members, initial beta testers and additional testers as warranted.
Purpose: Allow the Drupal community to review, use or make recommendations.

Version 2.0: Enterprise-ready Version

Timeframe: December 2009
Available: Downloads available from Phase2 servers / code on Drupal.org
Audience: Public Relations and communications professionals, publishers, journalists, researchers and policy analysts.
Purpose: To assist in the mining and tracking of topics in wide variety of industries.