monitoring - 2/4 - TheWayoftheWeb

Bit of a round-up for a busy day…

September 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

It’s been a busy day at work, so rather than adding to my list of ‘things I should really blog about when I find time’ file, I thought I’d clear a few things out:

First up is the news that that two Australian girls stuck in an Australian storm drain decided to update Facebook for help rather than phoning for help. My first response channelled the spirit of Bill Hicks, but it certainly raises an issue about how younger generations wish to communicate, even in emergencies. Should emergency services monitor the main social networks as a necessity, just in case? What happens if you’re a user of a niche social site, rather than Facebook or Twitter? And no monitoring system to my knowledge is 100% accurate at picking up every message on a service…
‘Just’ 25% of women are influenced by social networks when making purchases. Firstly, the fact that 25% are conscious of the influence is pretty impressive considering how new social networking still is for many people. Secondly, they aren’t influenced by social networks – they’re influenced by other people – the social network just makes this less geographically limited. I’d agree with Matt Wise from Q Interactive, who conducted the survey, that “brands are failing to use social networks to effectively target women” (Except I’d use the words engage or serve women), but in a lot of cases, they’re also failing for men too. And I’m not going to mention the Brand Republic headline for the story…
Technorati appears to have given up on monitoring. I can understand that Technorati has lost direction, particularly given the plethora of real-time search services, plus Google blog search etc. But I’m surprised that rather than concentrating on making their core business better, they appear to be trying to emulate the big content sites – given the efforts of brands like AOL etc, I can’t see Technorati being a big draw for content consumers (although I could be wrong). And the fact that they’ve dropped blog roll links from their monitoring, whilst also producing a lacklustre monitoring nod to Twitter, really suggests that they’re in search of a plan. Because obviously as I write this, blogging is dead…

That’s probably enough for today – I’ll end on a more constructive note for Technorati – rather than throwing away the monitoring side of the business to jump on the blog content and real-time bandwagons, why not improve the core product, as people have asked for years, and perhaps also implement a decent alternative to Feedburner? Give me decent monitoring, monetisation and innovation in RSS delivery and I’ll be a lot happier, as my RSS readership continues to grow proportionally. There are a lot of issues with the real-time web at the moment, and the non-real-time web isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

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Filed Under: Blogging, monitoring, Real-Time Web Tagged With: australian, Blogging, emergency, facebook, girls, monitoring, purchases, ranking, Real-Time Web, social media, storm drain, Technorati

When numbers become meaningless and dangerous

August 5, 2009 By Dan Thornton 3 Comments

I’ve just been looking at the latest stats from comScore (Via Techcrunch), and the statistics for Facebook‘s arrival as the fourth biggest site in the world illustrated for me why site stats can become both meaningless and rather dangerous.

For starters, the numbers of the top sites are so big that we don’t really have any way of guaging them – as Eddie Izzard explains using the examples of mass murder (some NSFW swearing).

But the big problem with numbers like these is that they can become very dangerous, due to the tendency for people to quote them as law, and rely on them:

Venus Blindfolded by Gastev on Flickr (CC Licence)

Reasons to worry:

Monitoring services like comScore and Compete can only track online traffic to domains – no clients and no apps. A particular problem at the moment for Twitter, but growing for all sites.
A certain percentage of users are always unquantifiable thanks to cookie deletion etc, or end up showing up different times on different computers
In the comScore example, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo sites are bundled up into their respective companies, so you can’t tell what comes from Google Search and what comes from Orkut or Google Maps.
No accounting for OpenID, Facebook Connect etc.

But essentially, the big risk is:

Unless you’re one of the top 20 or so sites, the total number of users of Facebook, Myspace, Bebo etc won’t matter much – you’ll still be able to get 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 fans/friends. What really matters is what you want to achieve, the relevancy of the network, and how you work at building valuable relationships rather than numbers.
And rather than numbers, look at the interactions, or for the business minded, how many people actually buy something…

But on the bright side:

Besides the fact we can accept social networking reaches almost as far as the internet with Facebook getting 340 million uniques per year, the fact that Wikimedia Foundations sites clock in right behidn it at 303 million uniques also shows the undeniable value of crowdsourcing user generated input if it’s done relatively well.

And maybe the combination of my three blogs will crack the top 10 next year!

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Filed Under: Analytics, social networks Tagged With: Analytics, facebook, figures, flaws, monitoring, numbers, social networks, statistics

Monitor the UK weather via Twitter mash-up

February 2, 2009 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

There’s a fantastic Twitter mash-up to capitalise on the UK fascination with weather – even if most of us will only see about an inch of snow at the moment.

#UKsnow Tweets

Recommended via @joannejacobs, it works by Twitter users posting a Tweet with the hashtag #uksnow and the appropriate postcode. For example “#uksnow NG9 3/10″

You can see it working by clicking on the image above or visiting the site of the creator, Ben Marsh, but I don’t know how long it will be running for – you could ask him on Twitter at @benmarsh!

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Filed Under: twitter Tagged With: #uksnow, google maps, mash-up, monitoring, reports, snow, twitter, uk, weather, weather map

Chatting with the man behind Twilert – the new Twitter alert service

December 4, 2008 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

Twilert is a new service which aims to bring the ease of Google alerts to the Twitter world. It’s up against Tweetbeep, which has offered alerts for a while, and both offer filtering by location. Twilert does have the edge on flexibility around the selected keywords, specifying both the username of the sender or the recipient of Tweets, and even offering some basic postive/negative attitude reporting.

So it seemed a good idea to find out more about Twilert, and especially how it might differentiate itself further in the future, by speaking to Dan Leach, who is behind the service.

What was the main inspiration for Twilert? Was it something you personally needed for monitoring Twitter in your day job?
The inspiration came about a month ago when I was looking through the Google Alerts I have setup for my various clients (I work in PR and marketing). A lot of the information was dated and I wanted to find a way of seeing what people were really saying and thinking about the brands and products I represent. As an obsessed Twitter fan I wanted to find a way of tracking conversation and opinion on the site without having to sit in front of a Twitter Search page all day. And so, Twilert was born.

What’s the main advantage over other monitoring services?

There are limited options available to people if they want to monitor “tweets”. Aside from the aesthetic differences between Twilerts and its competitors, the two main advantages include:

Full customisation of alerts: Twilerts options reflect exactly that of Twitter’s Search service which mean alerts can be tailored by keywords, author, recipient, location, link-location, and attitude (positive, negative, neutral). This means you can filter out irrelevant tweets from your alerts.
Ease of use: Twilert doesn’t require you to have a Twitter account, nor does it require any technical knowledge of Twitter or search. True story: to ensure the site was as user-friendly as possible, the test subject I used throughout development was my Mum. If she can use it then anyone can!

You’ve obviously built in some quite specific ways to filter messages: by location proximity, whether they include links, and by positive or negative attitude. How are you calculating the attitude of Tweets?

The attitudes of tweets is calculated by Twitter’s emotion algorithm (created first by Summize) which uses certain phrases and words that suggest a positive, negative or neutral phrase and maps them against keywords in the tweet.
It is by no means 100% accurate and will continue to evolve, however it will provide a decent enough snapshot of whether people are speaking positively or negatively about whatever you are tracking.

With such a comprehensive attempt at filtering is there anything you haven’t been able to include?

We have included everything that Twitters allows through its API. With the limited information that is provided with each tweet (author, recipient, location, content) it is difficult to filter them anymore than is already possible on Twilert.

The site was built by Codegent – if you funded the build, does this mean you have plans to recoup your money by monetising Twilert? Or by utilising the data on popular terms etc?

Monetising the service is a long way in the future – Twilert is less than a week old so our focus is 100% on providing a high quality service to our users. However, we will be exploring extended functionality that could be implemented for enterprise users. It is worth stressing though that the basic alert service will always remain free to users.

Twilert is definitely the weapon of choice for anyone looking for regular automated emails which compile your reports within potentially pretty specific criteria. It’s also one of the better looking 3rd party applications for Twitter, and being designed by someone working in PR and Media, it should be well placed to capitalise on the influx of brands and agencies looking to

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