The fact that the increasingly social Internet allows "the conversation" to spread across comments, Twitter posts, and news aggregators is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it is a wonderful thing to be able to enjoy and discuss content with a community in just about any way you can imagine. Publishers and enthusiasts, however, are still scrambling to keep up with and follow what others are saying about their content across all these services. uberVU, a new service in private beta, may finally be what we have all been looking for, so Ars sat down to track some conversations and have one of our own with cofounder Vladimir OANE.

UberVU's concept is simple: give it a URL for a story you like (or one you have published), and it will chomp through a broad selection of services like Twitter, Digg, Flickr, FriendFeed, and WordPress to find what people are saying about the story. UberVU follows through most URL-shortening services to make sure it is tracking the right comments, and you can label and sort the stories that you follow. In short, UberVU is a bit like an RSS reader, except in the inverse: instead of tracking multiple news stories from a single source (or searching them), it tracks what the rest of the world is saying about a particular story.

As uberVU finds new comments, they are marked separately from the total number of comments beside each story's headline. Clicking the new comment badge displays just those comments, and all comments are listed in chronological order, along with the user's avatar and the service's badge to help identify which service the comment was left on. You can even reply to comments on a handful of services right from uberVU, including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blogger, and Picasa, though this requires handing over relevant credentials for some services (Twitter can get around to implementing OAuth any day now). This turns uberVU into not just a window into the conversation, but a tool for participating it.

Replying to a Twitter users from within uberVU

UberVU is a Romanian company with three founders who, after winning a Seedcamp startup event and some venture funding, moved operations to London. OANE's team is using Amazon's storage services to help scale, building in Python and Django. While the company just launched and is not yet bringing in revenue, it is exploring a number of plans to do so, including tiered accounts for power users and journalists, as well as charging publishers and businesses for API access. That's right, there is an API for for harnessing uberVU's stream of comments or embedding them in your site or blog.

Despite uberVU's impressive approach to rounding up all these fragmented conversations, it is still an early beta. OANE says that, while his company can track obfuscated URLs from most of the URL-shortening services, some use "strange formulas" that allow for things like multiple hashes for a single URL. The site also features some impressive UI tools and even a bookmarklet for easily adding stories to track, but there are still plenty of conversations that uberVU cannot track due to its dependency on specific platform support. For example, uberVU can show us comments that users post to Digg about our stories, but it cannot show us comments from our own forums because we use Groupee, a less popular platform. Platform APIs create a conundrum for OANE's company—while they provide rich access for collecting comments that probably cannot be done (at least easily) any other way, they also create blind spots for uberVU's eyes.

It is also sometimes difficult to get back to the source of a comment, though this will undoubtedly improve with time. Some posts, such as those from Twitter and the Disqus hosted comment system, offer links to view the original, but comments on Digg and FriendFeed do not.

Perhaps a more significant drawback to uberVU is the inability to filter comments and services, or sort by relevance or clout. There is no way to turn off Digg comments or Twitter posts; you simply enter your URL and uberVU returns everything it finds. You also cannot sort Twitter posts to see what the most popular (or, perhaps more accurately, "most followed") users are saying about your stories. Viewing the entire conversation around your stuff is useful, but filtering to see what influencers are saying would be killer.

Beta gripes aside, uberVU is still an ambitious service that launched with a solid set of very unique conversation tracking features. Even in this early (private beta) stage, uberVU lends itself to everything from customer service to interactive journalism. As the company grows, look for more service compatibility and filtering options for making more use out of all these conversations.