Archive for social network

Twitter buys analytics company

Twitter, which recently announced its Promoted Tweets advertising program, has acquired the maker of a cloud-hosted Web analytics application, Twitter said Thursday.Smallthought Systems’ Trendly lets Web site owners dig deeper into the usage and traffic data that Google Analytics collects about their sites.

The Smallthought staff has become part of Twitter’s analytics team, where they will integrate Trendly features and technology into Twitter’s existing systems, as well as help develop new products.

In April, Twitter launched with a limited number of partners like Starbucks and Best Buy the Promoted Tweets program, which is designed to let companies market their products and services on the popular microblogging and social-networking site.

As with all advertising services, a key to the success of Promoted Tweets will be Twitter’s capacity to analyze the popularity and effectiveness of these ads so that campaigns can be evaluated and optimized.

The analytics for Promoted Tweets may be more challenging than for other online advertising programs for a few reasons, including the fact that the ad format for Promoted Tweets will be the same as the format for regular “tweets” and that Twitter’s usage is going through the roof, with 2 billion “tweets” posted in May, according to Web monitoring company Pingdom.

“Every day millions of people use Twitter to create, share and discover information, and as we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service,” reads Twitter’s announcement of its Smallthought acquisition.

Credit & Resource: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/061010-twitter-buys-analytics.html

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How Trendly helps your web marketing

Google Analytics does a great job of collecting your data, but it does a bad job of helping you understand it. For example, at Dabble DB, we are very interested in how many people come to us after searching for online database. Here’s what that keyword’s traffic looks like for the first few months of 2009:

Google Analytics keyword traffic example

It’s definitely going up and down a lot, but we don’t really care about daily fluctuation, we care about the trend. On average, how many people should we expect each day? And is that changing?

Trendly uses a statistical model to answer that question for us. It assumes that our traffic is going to stay the same for days, weeks, or even months at a time, but every once in a while something is going to change — like our ranking for “online database” improving, sending more people our way. The red line shows how Trendly sees this keyword over the same time period:

Trendly interpretation of keyword traffic

According to Trendly, our daily visitors from “online database” went up from 24 to 40 in early January, and then again up to 50 in early February. It reports these changes as items in a news feed:

Items in a news feed

By boiling several months of data down to a couple of items in a news feed, Trendly helps us keep on top of many different things at once. For example, this same feed actually tracks all of our search keywords:

Tracking all search keywords

You can see that our traffic from searches for co-founder Avi Bryant had a bump at the end of January (around the time he gave a talk at CUSEC), but went back down again. The sparklines beside each news item show those patterns concisely.

The news feed is continuous, and shows up to three years of history. If we want to see the earlier change to “online database”, we just scroll down a few weeks:

Scroll to see changes

The news feed does a great job of showing what’s changed, but it’s nice to put those individual keywords into a wider context. A chart running down the left provides the big picture:

A big chart for the big picture

The chart is locked to the same timescale as the news feed — and so, unlike most charts, time runs vertically. Each colored layer in the chart represents a single keyword. For example, the big green layer represents visits from “online database”. If I click on either the chart or the news item, the layer will pop out:

Pop-out layers

You can see how the green layer gets wider at the same time as the news item appears. The wider the layer, the more visits we get each day. The wider the chart as a whole — the sum of all the layers — the more visits we get in total from search. You can also see that Trendly tries to make things more meaningful by clustering similar keyword phrases together: The popup for “online database” shows that, while most (86%) of the searches in this cluster are for exactly “online database”, there are less frequent similar phrases that are also being included here, like “make an online database”.

Trendly isn’t just for tracking keywords. It has feeds for many of the reports you’re used to from Google Analytics: referrals, content, ad campaigns, and more. If you use goal tracking or ecommerce, Trendly also helps you track those:

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Innovative ways to use social software in combination

Collaboration cross firewall: I started to get involved in a Cloud project and had to travel to Shanghai every week in past one month. While out of my office during trip, or boarding @ airport, or sitting in cab, I’m out of the company firewall! That means I can’t access BlogCentral. My brain must “stop” in front of firewall. If I want to keep it thinking, I’d switch to public Web2.0 places.
Ease of combination: Have you used Ping.fm ? Or you may ask what Ping.fm is? In short, it’s a hub of collaboration and a practice of innovation. Let’s see a scenario: In a cab, I see a scene. I capture a photo by using my Nokia E71 smartphone (iPhone works too). After shooting, a small icon of mail prompts. Click mail icon, I’m in mail mode with the capture picture as an attachment. I pick an email address from contact list. Such email address is like vfr45t@ping.fm that was randomly assigned by Ping.fm . Whatever message sent to such account will automatically be updated into my accounts @ Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, MySpace, Blogger, Identi.ca, WordPress, Flickr, FriendFeed, Mashable, etc, you name it… All these could be finished within one minute. (Security is another topic though. I’d very carefully post the data in this very web2.0 way.)
Performance: WordPress is good. Working on company’s BlogCentral is a challenge. I lean to write @ twitter.com as I’m lazy and don’t have to write much :-P

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Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies

Source: http://blogs.cioinsight.com/knowitall/Gartner….htm

Egham, U.K., August 11, 2008 — Gartner, Inc. has identified 27 emerging technologies and predicts that eight of these will have a transformational business impact and should be strongly considered for adoption by technology planners in the next 10 years, according to the report “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2008.”

“Although Web 2.0 is now entering the Trough of Disillusionment, it will emerge within two years to have transformational impact, as companies steadily gain more experience and success with both the technologies and the cultural implications,” said Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “Later — in between two and five years — cloud computing and service-oriented architecture (SOA), which is moving up the Slope of Enlightenment, will deliver transformation in terms of driving deep changes in the role and capabilities of IT. Finally, public virtual worlds, which are suffering from disillusionment after their peak of hype in 2007, will in the long term represent an important media channel to support and build broader communities of interest.”

Technologies and trends at or around the peak of the Hype Cycle in 2008 (see Figure 1) that will reach the plateau in two to five years are:

  • Green IT — Along with broader societal pressure for environmentally sustainable solutions, IT has the opportunity — and in many cases, a requirement — to improve the “greenness” of its own activities, as well as to contribute to broader company and industry environmental initiatives.
  • Cloud computing — As companies seek to consume their IT services in the most cost-effective way, interest is growing in drawing a broad range of services (for example, computational power, storage and business applications) from the “cloud,” rather than from on-premises equipment. Many types of technology providers are aligning themselves with this trend, with the result that confusion and hype will continue for at least another year before distinct submarkets and market leaders emerge.
  • Social computing platforms — Following the phenomenal success of consumer-oriented social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, companies are examining the role that these sites, or their enterprise-grade equivalents, will play in future collaboration environments. The scope is also expanding to incorporate the notion of social “platforms,” or environments for a broad range of developers to build on the basic application.
  • Video telepresence — High-end videoconferencing systems (for example, from HP, Cisco, Teliris and others) that utilize large, high-definition (HD) displays and components to show life-size images of participants in meeting rooms or suites have proven significantly more effective than earlier generations of videoconferencing technology in providing a strong sense of in-room presence between remote participants. High cost is currently the barrier to broader adoption.
  • Microblogging — Pioneered by Twitter (although other services such as FriendFeed or Plurk are also available), microblogging is a relatively new addition to the world of social networking, in which contributors post a stream of very short messages providing information about their current activity or thoughts, which can then be subscribed to by others. The phenomenon has caught on among certain online communities, and leading-edge companies are investigating its role in enhancing other social media and channels.

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Finance2.0: New Business Models in Financial Services

Source: http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/…/1117

Author: Paul Kedrosky

Web 2.0 technology has enabled revolutionary opportunities in the space of finance. Social networking, user generated content, and collective intelligence are disrupting a traditionally conservative and closed industry. A number of promising Web 2.0-style offerings now enable consumers to share ideas and strategies, learn from others, provide ratings, and filter for relevant content. Will individuals become smarter about spending and saving? Can the collective ratings and analysis of ordinary investors help to uncover market-beating stock picks? Will markets for financial services become more open, and therefore more efficient? Will consumer pricing come down, or even become free?

This panel addresses the current Finance 2.0 wave by presenting leading start-ups, providing innovative services based on new business models that really work.

Sub-themes

  • Free business models that work: real revenue streams, not just customer acquisition (e.g., Zecco, Prosper, Mint, UpDown)
  • Leveling the playing field for everyday consumers: removing traction from traditionally costly economic transaction processes (e.g., $0 stock trades at Zecco Trading, better interest rates for borrowers and lenders at Prosper)
  • Collective intelligence based on real user data: both quantitative and qualitative data on actual user behavior, addressing the long tail not just the top five or ten percent of consumer interest (e.g., ZeccoShare, Cake Financial, PredictWallStreet, Wikinvest)

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My comments and additional information >

Mint.com – Free personal money management. Check their blog

Zecco.com – Free online stock trading. Check their Community which contains Dashboard, Blog and Forums to collaborate

Prosper.com – Loaning at low rate. Check their Forum to hear of voice from developer, lender, borrower…

PredictWallStreet.com – you may enjoy to play game and contest in its community, where you can find an export to follow. And listen to how other members are saying. A latest list on August 21st shows a member – SilveRazor – made 389 predicts correct out of 586 evaluated. Cool!

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Tag Database Schema

Source: http://www.pui.ch/phred/archives/2005/04/tags-database-schemas.html

mysqlicious sample datamysqlicious database stucture
In this solution, the schema has got just one table, it is denormalized.
This type is called “MySQLicious solution” because MySQLicious imports del.icio.us data into a table with this structure.

Intersection (AND)

Query for “search+webservice+semweb”:
SELECT *
FROM `delicious`
WHERE tags LIKE "%search%"
AND tags LIKE "%webservice%"
AND tags LIKE "%semweb%"

Union (OR)

Query for “search|webservice|semweb”:

SELECT *
FROM `delicious`
WHERE tags LIKE "%search%"
OR tags LIKE "%webservice%"
OR tags LIKE "%semweb%"

Minus

Query for “search+webservice-semweb”
SELECT *
FROM `delicious`
WHERE tags LIKE "%search%"
AND tags LIKE "%webservice%"
AND tags NOT LIKE "%semweb%"

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Flickr Tagging – Heart of Web2.0

While I doing Web2.0 presentation in my company, I mention Tagging is heart of Web2.0. People used to ask me what tagging service could impact enterprise business and people’s life. I’d like to point this to Flickr, who introduced Tagging to Web2.0.

This simple URL shows the “tag cloud” in front of us. What do you see? What kind of information do you receive? Simple, eh? The bigger the font of tag is, the more popular such topic is. Go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ then click around. Seems “family” is the most active tag used. Does it tell you what the majority people think or care?

Oh, and “party” one… If we compare “canon” and “nikon”, “canon” looks a little bolder than “nikon”. That indicates the pictures loaded in Flickr.com were mostly captured by Canon camera. Let’s look at “london” and “paris”, “london” is bigger, and even “paris” is a little bit bigger than “newyork”.

Go to Flickr.com and see by yourself. I have my photo gallery too, but without tag.

http://penguinsecurity.net/gallery

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Learning2.0

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