Social Media Roundup and Other Tangents
Let me introduce you to the monthly social media and analytics roundup: a gathering of information on new startups in the social media and analytics realm including interesting tidbits about the available tools out there. This month I was surprised to hear about Marc Andreesen’s pet project RockMelt and the new competition in that space.
RockMelt: The most intriguing aspect of this social browser add on is the fact that it is backed by former Netscape founder Marc Andreesen as well as engineered by John Churchill former main Netscape navigation engineer. Netscape was the first all purpose web browser will RockMelt be the first of its kind in the social browser space? If you ask me I wouldn’t bet the farm on RockMelt but I do believe that if RockMelt keeps evolving through market calibration it could carve out a nice niche for itself.*
The competition…
F1: Has the battle of the Social Media Browsers begun? A comprehensive add-on to Firefox web browser is F1. Designed by Andy Chung a Mozilla add-on enthusiast. The add-on is limited to Twitter, Facebook and Gmail but insinuates that they are not done there with an API welcoming publishers to connect and grow the F1 add-on.
One side effect of social media web browsers is they connect to twitter and facebook allowing them to track your activity giving them more statistical power for advertisements, just like Facebook does with connecting ads to people based on interests likes and or dislikes.
Onto the twitter tangent…
Recenlty an article came out on how three researches discovered a pattern between the overall mood of twitter and how it corresponded to the fluctuations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. They used two algorithms: OpinionFinder and Google Profile of Mood States. The algorithms separated positive and negative tweets: whichever type of tweets tipped the balance would result in the public mood. The mood states had an astonishing 87.6% level of accuracy when overlaid over the fluctuations of the DJIA. This peaked my interest and I wanted to know more. I also wanted to know at the minimum what tools were out there to the public since the above algorithms were done through an analysis toolkit not accessible to the average person.
What does this mean to your business and tribe?
We are starting to see the things you can do when social data is aggregated and filtered. The more people use social media the more footprints we can track, how people feel about certain things, their likes and dislikes and everything in between. The future is analytics displayed in numbers and graphic interfaces. One day we may be able to accurately track a business’s ads, blog posts, services and products based upon analytics that display the subsequent mood providing business intelligence and to better understand their key performance indicators.
Enough of the research and development side of the Twittersphere and onto solid tools that I use a lot for research purposes. Twitter’s search box is pretty limited especially when you need to find lists of users with similar characteristics. With the use of Google search function this becomes a whole lot easier.
1) Search by occupation: (on google search) intitle:”occupation* on twitter” site:twitter.com
This searches the title and name of the twitter users.
2) Search twitter bios: intext:”bio * photographer” site:twitter.com
Swap “photographer” for your specified search term
3) Search by location: intext:”bio * firm” intext:”location * PA” site:twitter.com
Swap “firm” for your bio search term and “PA” for you state initials location
*Since the writing of this post RockMelt has been acquired by Yahoo and retired. (updated 12/29/16)
