Author Archives: Mark J. Hoy

About Mark J. Hoy

Texifter CTO Mark J. Hoy brings over 18 years of professional IT experience as well as over 28 years of programming hailing from a wide swath of areas including academic research, R&D for the defense industry and the Director of Programming for a graphic design and multimedia firm. Mark graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 with a Masters in Information Technology, Software Design and Management as well as in 2000 with a B.S. in Information and Decision Systems. When not poking around with the internals of DiscoverText, Mark keeps himself busy as an amateur guitarist for over 20 years and a tinkerer of all things.

The DiscoverText API

 Posted on April 4, 2012 by Mark J. Hoy

Many have asked for it, and your requests have not fallen on deaf ears. We are proud to announce the DiscoverText development team is testing an Application Programming Interface (API) to our internal “sifter” data structures. The new DiscoverText API … Continue reading →

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Updates to the DiscoverText Terms of Service

 Posted on July 25, 2011 by Mark J. Hoy

Effective July 25th, 2011, Texifter has modified the Terms of Service governing its DiscoverText product and the use of Texifter’s services and sites in general. The primary changes of importance include: Paragraph 1.1: we’ve removed the phrase “and excluding any … Continue reading →

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Peer Network Privacy Controls

 Posted on June 25, 2011 by Mark J. Hoy

Tonight, we introduce two slightly overlooked but very powerful features of DiscoverText – building peer networks within the system and privacy controls. The peer functions and privacy controls within DiscoverText have been around since the inception of the system, so … Continue reading →

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Search All Public Facebook Posts

 Posted on June 16, 2011 by Mark J. Hoy

All this week, we’ve been highlighting some of the new features and functionality recently added to DiscoverText. Tonight, Texifter staff is excited to present the ability to search across all available public Facebook posts and pull those comments into a … Continue reading →

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“Cloud Explorer” – More Than Just a Tag Cloud

 Posted on June 14, 2011 by Mark J. Hoy

Continuing from last night’s blog post regarding Texifter’s latest work regarding the new navigation design and functionality in DiscoverText, tonight I’d like to introduce you to DiscoverText’s Cloud Explorer. Most traditional tag clouds such as Wordle and TagCrowd only give … Continue reading →

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DiscoverText Gets a Major Usability Upgrade and New Functionality

 Posted on June 13, 2011 by Mark J. Hoy

Over the past couple of months, we here at Texifter have been working hard on improvements and new functionality for DiscoverText. Over the course of this week, we’ll be releasing these new improvements and I’ll be writing up a blog … Continue reading →

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Connect Existing Facebook & DiscoverText Accounts

 Posted on May 24, 2011 by Mark J. Hoy

Many people have asked us “How to I import Facebook data if I have a regular DiscoverText Account?” – The short answer is that there is no way to pull in Facebook feeds within DiscoverText unless you register and login … Continue reading →

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New DiscoverText Import Available: Congressional Bills Via GovTrack

 Posted on May 18, 2011 by Mark J. Hoy

Tonight we’ve added a new import ability to DiscoverText – for any user with a Professional or Enterprise license (as well as the 30-day free trial license), you can now directly import data on Federal Congressional bills. Thanks to the … Continue reading →

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The Return of Google Reader Feeds in DiscoverText

 Posted on May 11, 2011 by Mark J. Hoy

A number of months ago, Google Reader removed its direct ability to get an RSS feed of the feeds for your reader account. Due to this, we had to take the feed ingestion of Google Reader feeds offline inside of … Continue reading →

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Text Analysis during the 2011 State of the Union Address

 Posted on February 3, 2011 by Mark J. Hoy

As part of the underlying research Texifter is doing on sentiment and topic analysis, we collected data from various Twitter and Facebook feeds +/- 48 hours during the 2011 State of the Union address on Tuesday, January 25th, 2011. Texifter … Continue reading →

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