For People who like Mail: Social Digest

Many people are posting on Social Media, and there are many who don’t want to constantly follow everything live that is said by their friends. For them there is now Social Digest. Social Digest makes it possible to get a full list of all the tweets send by your social group, whether it’s the public stream, DMs or lists – which I’m sure Scoble will like. It also lists the users who were active that day. It’s like having your Facebook wall in your mail, although Facebook support is in the pipeline.

There is also integration for people who want to follow what their friends are listening to on Last.FM. The other service they currently support is Hyves, but I doubt that they will limit their scope to only these services.

For the business users there are plans to make it possible to get digests over multiple Twitter accounts in one digest mail so business users can do the due diligence over their multiple accounts. And after showing them the wonderful features of DataSift they are looking into implementing a similar mark-up language to be able to extract data which can be flagged with in the Digest. And I see further potential for integration with DataSift.

I’m happy to say that as the twitter whale in the pre-alpha I helped them discover many faults with the algorithm and forced them to turn the Twitter API inside out to be able to do some of the requests.

They have plans for a 2011 launch.

Kings of Code Conference #kingsofcode

This week I went to the Kings of Code Conference, to “explore and discuss the latest trends, developments and best practices in web and mobile development technologies.” It included a hackbattle, lots of presentations and free beer.

HackBattle

Playing with Geckoboard #analytics

I’d gotten access to Geckoboard halfway through January, I was happy to play with it for Snypher and see what the results were. Naturally I am getting all this data somewhere else, and to get this in a sleek interface makes a difference. I did immediately have the feeling that it would be even better with an LCARS Star Trek like interface.

Third Party Support
CRM: Get Satisfaction UserVoice Zendesk	Social Media: Only Twitter
Project Management: GitHub BaseCamp	Analytics: Pingdom Google Analytics

In terms of usefulness it takes about 30 minutes to set up a reasonable overview of the data you want. It supports a number of CRMs, Analytics and Project Management interfaces, but as far as social media is concerned it only supports Twitter.

For the future I would be happy to see a statistics module for social media, perhaps with a DataSift hookup.

Seesmic Interface and Feature Updates #social

Who else noticed that Seesmic Web‘s interface and functionality changed? They added Tweet scheduling and Klout scores below the Tweets, I hope they implement more changes soon so they can better compete with Hootsuite and the other Twitter clients.

The issue with Seesmic Web is that they are using a web based platform, which – unlike a desktop client – makes it difficult to create add ons, with the exception of Greasemonkey userscripts. This means it’s difficult for third parties to create new features without giving them access to a Web Service.

Image source:

Dutch Internet Pacifism Meme gets me a Facebook Block #freedom #groenlinks

I usually don’t use this blog as a political forum, and as of changing my FaceBook profile picture to a campaign poster of the Dutch Pacifist Socialist Party, (seen left) now known as GroenLinks I was banned from Facebook. This is an Internet meme started after the decision by the Dutch political party GroenLinks neglecting their pacifist roots and opting to side with a right government and send soldiers and police to Afganistan.

What’s funny is that I didn’t even upload the picture, I just tagged it and set it as my profile picture. I warned fellow party members, and they will mostly likely not take down their protest against the Dutch political party.

I wonder if Amnesty International will take up my plight, like they took up the plight of the app developers who get banned from the Apple app store.

Image source: Dutch Pacifist Socialist Party

Proof Of Concept: Adding value for “Recorded Future”

I like to give suggestions to companies – add value – and did this for Recorded Future‘s informational mails – called futures – created by what they call the Temporal Analytics Engine. I was able to make a quick prototype thanks to the image editor in Google Docs^[1], and make a quick list of bullet items using Google NoteBook^[2], which I fear Google with end-of-life sometime in 2011.

Recorded Future - Example Layout

RF was naturally grateful that I, even as a free customer, was willing to spend my valuable time to give them suggestions. Naturally I don’t expect them to follow my vision, whether they use my ideas or not I added value for myself.

Speaking of adding value, I have my Alpha code for DataSift so I will be coming with my evaluation of their product next week.

1. Recorded Future – Future Example
2. Recorded Future – Google Notebook

Facebook is the new Portal for Insurers and Banks #social #finance

It looks like every man and his dog needs to have a Facebook page, even banks and insurance companies are getting into the game. Very much like the turn of the century idea that every company needed a landing page or portal. What’s the advantage for an insurance company or bank? Customer knowledge.

Many interesting things can be gleaned from Social Media, such as behaviour patterns of customers. And it is an ideal way to direct market to current customers. Still customers may be fearful of exposing their habits to their bank or insurance company. I wouldn’t want an insurance company knowing everything about me and raising my premiums as a consequence, and theirin lies the rub. Both banks and insurers have been known for being poor customer service providers when it comes to paying out the money to customers who have placed their trust in them, charging – in some cases overcharging – and leaving the customers with nothing or even with huge debts.

How can the insurance companies overcome the cognitive bias that the customer has? Possibly by giving up their attitude polarization and playing a game which is win-win in the best case or a non-zero sum in the worst.

Social Revolution – Do You Get It?

I don’t really think most people get “it” when it comes to Social Revolution, they talk about Twitter and FaceBook as if these have inherent qualities. There is indeed nothing social about FaceBook or Twitter, they are tools which can be used to interact with in a social way or an anti-social way.

Watching your Twitter feed scroll past clicking the occasional link you might as well be using StumbleUpon, wanting to keep up with all the messages is a pipe dream. Imagine all these messages being printed out and put in an envelop and posted to you by mail. Now imagine the size your mailbox would need to be. You can’t!? I doubt you know how many messages come in and humans are notoriously bad at estimating complex numbering systems.

So why don’t you get it? You use FaceBook Top News, Twitter Lists and Google Priority Inbox to reduce your workload; you don’t need to react to and read everything, you can retrieve it all later by search. You respond to all your direct messages or mentions, and the world is scrolling by in your Home Feed.

I started this blog because I read The “Intimate Social” Revolution and @svartling‘s question: I will use it as long as its free: Which HootSuite for you? Pro or Basic?, and both stories should be telling HootSuite that Basic the the better option: It’s free and has the potential to make your social circle smaller. And I’m saying this as a power user. What they aren’t delivering and I know their customers would like – as they have a crippled version – are the answers to the questions:

1. Am I getting what I need to know?
2. Who are the people I need to reach?
3. Am reaching the people I need to reach?
4. Am I adding value?

That’s a product worth paying for.

1 Hour in the Life of a reddit Post #socialnews

I decided to have a look at the effect that posting an item, originally blogged on Wednesday, to reddit would have, this is the item that I posted:

You can see below that I get the most hits from the what’s new section, although I get some hits from the front page. Now I wouldn’t advise link spamming this certainly shows that there’s an advantage to posting your news items to reddit, and certainly more statistics are needed to breakdown the effectivity of reddit posts.

Naturally I also had organic traffic, and the post to reddit generated 24 of the 26 hits to the article with in the first hour, half of which came from the ‘what’s new’ feed.

Now just imagine if I had said something interesting in my reddit post.

Simplicity Is Key – Trends in Website Design

I’ve been noticing a trend in the frontpage of website design, which I have briefly modeled below. I have an idea that this might have been inspired by Google’s “more is less” for their landing page, although they tend to go for less simplicity with the exception of search.

Firstly it’s the two or three tone webpage, a colored band of content in the centre of the page separating the top link bar and the bottom rest space. In the top row the navigation is placed slightly left aligned, with or without a small logo preceding it on the absolute left. Usually the sign-in and -up possibilities are aligned at the right of the page.

The centre band usually contains a large logo left aligned or a large non-descriptive image, left there is possible a login box, although usually there is a sign-up or pricing box advertising the paid for version. Underneath there are three boxed the left box containing video or or an interactive feature, the centre mentioning a special feature – or niche feature – of the product offered, and the right hand box containing “Something Special”, which can be anything like mobile applications, Google Apps or platforms supported.

The top of the lower band usually also contains 3 boxes, the left containing video examples – if not used before. The centre contains the other common features of the product. And the right is often a media exposure box, although it can also contain a social media box, such as a Twitter or FaceBook stream. The next row in the lower band usually contains a broad box containing blog or news items, although customer or media feedback is also very common here, and the right box contains that what wasn’t included in the upper box. Finally the last row, if it’s there, contains any 2 or 3 box combination with any of the items not mentioned above, although it often contains a social media box on the right when it hasn’t been mentioned above.

The lowest part of the site, mostly contains a sitemap, with direct links to most of the important pages on the site.

So now you know how it’s made.