Tattletech Hot Seat with Dragos Ilinca, uberVU

Tattletech always finds itself in good company – always around start ups that seem to have their finger on technology that will pull the current market forward and with entrepreneurs that do more than focus on the technology but how to apply it to our lives. When we met Dragos, we knew immediately this compay was onto something. We caught up with uberVU’s Co-Founder, Dragos Ilinca and here is what he had to say. (uberVU was also a 2008 Seedcamp winner!)

Tattletech: So… let’s start with the question you are probably asked over and over again, what DOES uberVU mean?

Dragos Ilinca: uber is a German word that means “more, better, super”, just like in ubergeek or uberblogger. “VU” is just a misspelled “view”. we weren’t trying to be cute, but uberview.com <http://uberview.com>  was taken.  So in its essence uberVU refers to having a “superview” of the conversation on the Web.

TT:  Will aggregating all of the conversation threads into one place make the online world a smaller one, in the positive sense of the word?

DI: Quite possibly. All the people that comment on a story are part of the same community, they’re interacting around the same social object. So the online world around a story will be bigger, as you’ll be aware of people you did not know commented on a story. It might be smaller in the sense of more intimate, as in time, there will be many more familiar faces around each story or blog or content source. The point is that people should care about who is commenting and what they are saying and not have to worry about the underlying platform.

TT:  At the end of almost each article or blog post we see an unending list of icons and link backs – will Ubervu end all of that clutter?

DI: Some of those icons have their purpose, such as sharing the article on different services. The purpose is not necessarily to end that clutter, but be able to interact with people on the services that the icons represent without paying much attention to the service itself. This means getting comments from people everywhere in one place and also allowing you to reply to those people from one place. It’s about freeing the conversations from closed silos and exposing people to each other.

TT: What is the main differentiator between what you do and others? Do you trace the conversation and not the user profile?

DI: Yes, that’s the main difference. We get comments around a story, not around a person, user profile or keyword. Whether those will be included I don’t know at this point. One more difference is the ability to reply from within uberVU, in the sense that they reply gets sent back to the site/service where it should belong. From this point of view, we seem to be a great complement to a lot of existing services that people are already avid users of.

TT: Do you think users will quickly adopt using uberVU?

DI: Hopefully, although that’s not the goal in the short term.  Our main goal is to understand how people are using uberVU, what they need and don’t need from it and how to transform those demands into usable features so that they do start to use uberVU regularly. I think we still have some way to go until uberVU hits the bullseye and becomes just right for people. That’s why we’re experimenting with different things right now, such as being integrated by Disqus through our API. Maybe we’ll be a great destination site, or maybe we’ll serve as an infrastructure service that will only be used by way of API.

– SM and JLH

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mashable, Disqus and UberVU Launch Social Media Comments (mashable.com)
• Mashable innovates with new Twitter ad format (inquisitr.com)

Tags: Dragos Ilinica, Social Networking, Ubervu