The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘are-embarrasing’

It’s not a bad joke, Twitter is apparently somehow involved in a new TV show. Among other things, this earns it our rarely used “WTF” in sign language image.

Twitter has not yet responded to an email, but investor Fred Wilson seems to think it’s a good idea, saying “TV isn’t TV anymore. It’s just the largest screen in the house.”

So we’ll wait for more details of the show to surface before we write the inevitable blog post trashing the idea. In the meantime, Twitter, as a heavy user there are a nearly unlimited number of things I’d so much rather you guys spend your time on than going Hollywood. Here’s a few key ones, I’m guess lots more will show up in the comments and we’ll get to at least 300 or so things Twitter could better spend its time.

Keep The Lights On. Twitter is still not a stable service.

Fix Track. This is the “Google Alerts” feature of Twitter that made a brief appearance in 2007 but was stripped out in the uptime wars of 2008. It may have made sense to remove it at the time, but we’re long past due on this much needed feature.

Fix Search. Twitter’s main value is as a search engine, and it’s pretty broken. There’s lots of work to do here.

Stop Breaking Stuff. Twitter just doesn’t seem to feel comfortable in its own skin, making changes to suit the masses that are just confusing and need to be reversed.

Fix Private Messages. Twitter’s direct messages (private messages) has occasional hiccups. Sometimes they are mis-delivered, as in they go to the wrong person. That just can’t happen.

Maybe Launch Some Features. Twitter is so concerned with uptime that they rarely (never) launch new features. Sites like FriendFeed are embarrasing them with innovation, and others like Facebook are copying the core Twitter service. I get that uptime is important, but if you have time for meetings in Hollywood, you have time to add new features. Spend that time interviewing new engineers at the very least. You need more people badly.

Ok, that’s six. Let me know what you’d like to see Twitter do before working on a television show in the comments, and we’ll add the smartest and most entertaining to the main post.

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As YouTube and Twitter have become essential marketing tools for brands and companies, there has been an emergence of startups that help marketers track the buzz around a certain individual or brand. Radian6, Visible Measures, Omgili, Omniture and a plethora of others offer tools to monitor blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites for mentions of a company or individual’s name. Startup Viralheat is entering this space with the private beta launch of its affordable social media measurement product that scours social video sites including YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo, and Twitter to deliver real-time results of consumer generated content on these sites.

Viralheat allows you to create profiles to track an individual’s name or a company’s name across nearly 30 video sites and Twitter. The platform’s Twitter tool provides data on how many total mentions an item had on Twitter for the week and for the given day, the most active Twitter user who has Tweet about a brand, the most common language of Tweets, percentage of Tweets about a brand that are Retweets, the most active day of the week for mention of a brand and a sentiment breakdown of Tweets. For example, a profile created for “Obama” shows there were just over 7,000 tweets today including the name “Obama,” and over 32,000 total Tweets this week. The service also provides a graph of the number of Tweets over the past week and shows the most recent Tweets about the item updated in real-time, which you can Tweet out directly from Viralheat’s platform or email to others.

The video tool will filter the breakdown of a brand or individual over video sites, letting you know how many mentions were made over each video platform. The video dashboard will let you know what the most popular video was, how many videos were found with a certain brand or name in a given week, the average number of video downloads per day and how many total views the videos received in a week. Similar to the Viralheat’s twitter feed, the site pulls in a real-time feed of the videos and allows you to email or tweet links to the videos directly from the platform.

Any data from the Twitter and video dashboards can be exported directly into PDF files or Excel spreadsheets, making it easy for marketers to share this data with others. Viralheat also lets users share a snapshot their profiles of brands, trends, individuals, etc. with the public. Under a trends page, anyone can see the performance of profiles of brands or individuals broken down by subject (politics, sports, movies, television).

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