A ‘TV guide’ for Periscope streams

Livestreaming apps Periscope and Meerkat are huge right now. But with everyone creating streams, how do you find the best stuff?
Kevin Jackson and Chris Baglieri — both big Periscope users and teammates at Old City’s Artisan Mobile — want to help. They built Streamalong, like a TV guide for streams, as Baglieri put it in a blog post.
Upvote them on Product Hunt here. (The project was submitted by Curalate marketing director Brendan Lowry.)
The pair built Streamalong in one week, they told us. Right now it’s just Periscope streams, but they would add Meerkat streams if there’s user interest.
Periscope doesn’t have an API, so Streamlong is “piggybacking on Twitter’s Streaming API,” Baglieri wrote in an email.
Here’s how Baglieri described the technology behind the tool and how it chooses what to display:

We have an parsing engine ingesting tweets. We then categorize those tweets in two phases. Phase one prunes out broadcasts where the potential reach is limited. While admittedly a rough estimate, higher quality content generally comes from broadcasters who have access to a wider audience. Phase two slots broadcasts in to channels. Channel categorization leverages keywords, hashtags, details about the broadcaster, and any other bits of metadata we can collect along the way. There’s substantially more coming with regards to bucketing content, the current approach is merely a first step.

Read Jackson’s post about Streamalong on his blog here.