FAQ
Why the name “Cascaad”?
Well, first because we like this name but also because it connects to the concept of information cascades, which describes how information can spread virally within a community through word-of-mouth. The way information cascades develop in real life has actually inspired our social relevance ranking algorithms.
What is CascaadReader?
CascaadReader is a new generation social dashboard centered around your interests. CascaadReader helps you discover the personally relevant developments in your world by continuously distilling what your friends and millions more are discussing on Twitter and Facebook into noteworthy stories, things and places that match your specific interests and social circles.
How do I get CascaadReader on my iPhone?
Is CascaadReader a free service?
Completely! All functionality you see is absolutely free to you and there are no premium versions!
How do I really take advantage of CascaadReader?
Just by using it, indicating items you particularly liked or disliked and deciding to share them or not, Cascaad will tune the content to match your tastes and with time it will surface always more personally relevant content for your consumption.
How do I get my personalized newspaper, FrontPage?
You can get your personalized newspaper created at anytime, while logged into the CascaadReader. Once you click on the button on the top-left part of the screen (“FrontPage”), Cascaad will generate automatically a personalized newspaper-like page that will include all most interesting and personally-relevant articles and posts/tweets from your social network. FrontPage is an excellent way to start your social consumption experience every day, or every time you log into your favourite social sites after having been for some time ‘offline’.
Where does FrontPage get all the content?
Frontpage gets the content to display from several sources. First and foremost, it grabs the best articles, pictures and videos that were shared by your social network. Additionally, FrontPage also brings to your attention content that you might find interesting, and labels it “Recommended”. Both the content shared from your social networks and the one recommended has been filtered and ordered by Cascaad’s algorithms,
What is the difference between the “TOP” and the “LATEST” view within CascaadReader?
The posts/tweets in “Latest” are simply ordered in a chronological fashion. In the “TOP” view, Alternatively, the criterion used for the “TOP” view is to order any message in a specific way so that the resulting list is personally-relevant for the user logged-in.
What happens when I decide to “TRACK” a topic?
Once you decide to “track” a topic, you will start receiving related tweets/posts on your timeline, mixed with the ones coming from your trusted social network.
Based on what logic Cascaad recommends new topics for me in the “DISCOVER” section?
Cascaad’s technology have focused on semantic analysis, influence scoring and topics relevance. Based on this criteria, Cascaad will propose topics currently being discussed on social networks which might be interesting for the user receiving them. The new topics though are only proposed, and this is the reason the user finds them in the “Discover” section: it is still the user that decides whether s/he would like to start following these topics or not.
How does CascaadReader interact with my social networks?
To make the most of CascaadReader, you need to link at least your Twitter account to your CascaadReader profile. You can browse the realtime web without, but the experience will be more limited in this case. Once you have linked your Twitter account, CascaadReader will be able to retrieve your home timeline and surface its most relevant items. You will also be able to post new messages and share the content and topics that grab you on Twitter and Facebook.
‘Relevant news’ – what is that?
Cascaad’s technology identifies what's relevant for you by merging a series of criterions: the matching of any content item with your personal interest profile, the level of attention that the item is receiving within your extended social sphere and the personalized influence associated with the people who contribute to the item's propagation. In this way you won't need to scroll dozens of useless retweets; you will directly receive the most interesting ones.
A discovery engine? How does it works?
The normal usage of Twitter and/or Facebook is to read all the tweets/posts published by the people you follow or are connected to, which quickly can get quite noisy. Not to mention all the interesting information from outside your social connections that you might miss. What Cascaad’s technology does is to surface what is likely to interest you by analyzing and ranking the conversations taking place in a much larger social sphere constructed around you.
How can I follow the level of my tuning in CascaadReader?
You can check it directly on your profile page, available both on the web site as on the iPhone app. The tuning is measured on a scale from 0 to 100, and Cascaad keeps on improving the tuning as long as the user continues to engage with its systems.
What about my privacy?
We take your privacy very seriously. Your interest profile is simply... yours. It feeds the personalization algorithms designed to improve your media experience, but in no way do we make the data public. Some of your other profile information is made public, such as your username, avatar and the topics you are tracking, to foster social discovery and the gathering of like-minded people around common interests. To find out more on how we manage your data, read our Privacy Policy. Should you have any lingering concern, just contact us.
