by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 26, 2009
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of FriendFeed and I find more value with it than Twitter.
That being said I am very excited about the release of FeedStats from my fellow Iowans over at Microblink…
From their release…
Today we’d like to announce our second public project, FeedStats. FeedStats exists for the purpose of visualizing FriendFeed users’ data to see how they interact not only with the service, but with other users. It’s a quick way to find what services they’re using, when they post, and who interacts with their content the most.
[click to continue…]
by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 14, 2009
What The Hashtag is a service from the Microblink team that helps track and analyze hashtags on Twitter. Hashtags are denoted by the “#” symbol in front of a word and have become a way for people to track and follow Twitter discussions. The WTH service was born out of the need to have a centralized wiki for people to find out more information about the hashtag.
While improving the layout and design of the site, the team added some great new features. First, they’ve added additional statistics.
We’ve been tracking the number of times a hashtag is being used for awhile, as well tracking the top contributors, but now we also call out the number of uses made by each contributor, and the total number of tweets and unique contributors for a week’s worth of usage.
You can also run transcripts of hashtag usage – which allows you to export all of the tweets from a specific hashtag for any date range. This eliminates the tedious task of scrolling through Twitter search to catch up on missed tweets.
One of my favorite new features they have added is the ability to watch and participate in a hashtag conversation directly on their site. Now you can join the conversation while watching it in real time…
Click the participate link and a box will pop open allowing you to craft your message. You will be greeted by a message box with the familiar character counter and your hashtag already inserted. Just include your username and password and we submit everything to Twitter directly through their API.
[click to continue…]
by Andy Brudtkuhl on February 27, 2009
If you are familiar with Twitter, than you have seen a hashtag before. If not, a hashtag is “a combination of the pound symbol (#) followed by a keyword, generally associated with whatever topic is being tracked” (via Microblink). Essentially, hashtags are a great way to track discussion about specific topics. But there is a problem with these – half the time you see them and have no idea what they mean. #FOWA = Future of Web Apps.. If you aren’t in tune with that conference you’d see thousands of people using it and have no idea what they are talking about.
In steps What the Hashtag?! – a new service from Microblink announced today that aims to help track the origin and meaning of these seemingly random hashtags. So what is this new service? It’s a “user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter” – using the popular open source wiki solution MediaWiki.
It works by finding finding trends on Twitter and generating the page. Hashtags can also be added by anyone who has created an account. So far there have been 480 hashtags indexed in the first seven days of operation. Microblink has also created a number of tools to interact with the service – including a Twitter bot that accepts direct messages, a Greasemonkey script, and a Search Engine plugin for Firefox.
Read the Microblink Announcement
Check out What The Hashtag?!
