The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘google-alerts’

Trackle, the personalized web and realtime feed tracker, is going pro with the launch of premium tracking services aimed at marketing and PR professionals looking to track mentions of clients across the web. Trackle.com’s web service lets users create personalized RSS feeds for data such as the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, updated job listings, sports scores and more.

On Trackle, marketing, PR and sales professionals can set up realtime tracking alerts for key words to track press coverage and mentions across Tweets, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and the web. The initial service will allow users to enable “Trackles” for a select number of keyword categories, including company, person, brand, SEC filings; website changes and LinkedIn updates. Trackle will email and SMS alerts for mentions and even provide users with graphs and charts detailing results. The service is available for $9.99 per month.

Trackle, which launched a year ago, recently became more social by allowing you search and follow other users’ Trackles by keyword. The search platform also lets users filter the sources by credibility, social network and more. Trackle will also show users who have similar interests, so you can. The startup is also trying its hand at setting up Trackle button on sites to provide instant tracking options directly to consumers to allow users “Trackle” an item or feed from anywhere on the web.

Trackle now has 100,000 users and is generating 2 million alerts of information each day. It’s sort of like Google Alerts on steroids. But the premium service will face competition from the plethora of social media and web tracking services in the space, including Viralheat, Socialseek and others. As we’ve said in the past, the major obstacle Trackle will face is gaining more users and becoming viral. But it seems that the site is looking to engage PR and marketing professionals instead of consumers and with its reasonable pricing, it could find a loyal following in this sector.

On average, most businesses currently double the number of digital documents they have every twelve to eighteen months. The impact of this rapid addition of content, argues Google, is that the search functionality of an organization’s databases and Websites need to be scalable in a dynamic environment. Google maintains that scalability is a crucial need of enterprises today, which is why the new version of Google’s Search Appliance (GSA) for enterprise search customers has added a powerful, dynamic scalability feature, allowing businesses to now index billions of documents, in addition to indexing Web pages.

To extend search into the enterprise, Google offers businesses its GSA product, a yellow box (that resembles a slice of Swiss cheese), which is based on a standard Dell server and is powered by Xeon 5500 Series processors from Intel. The GSA can index any enterprise data generated by Oracle databases, SAP systems, Documentum, SharePoint, Salesforce.com, HR systems, intranets, wikis, and more, and presents it to employees in a familiar Google-like interface. The sixth generation GSA will be able to index 30 million documents, compared to 10 million in the last generation. In the sixth generation of the GSA, Google is now adding functionality to let businesses stack GSAs on top of each other, so businesses can search billions of documents across integrated GSAs. The fifth generation GSAs were not able to be interconnected.

The new version of the GSA also allows businesses to separate data by sector of an organization (engineering, marketing, finance) but still be able to provide unified search results of all data contained within each appliance. Each department can also monitor and regulate which documents should be integrated into enterprise-wide search and which should be kept within the department’s search.

In the new version of the GSA, Google has upgraded the customization of the appliance, adding several new features to help businesses tailor the GSA to their search needs. First, Google now allows administrators to specify whether the GSA will implement late binding, which is real time authorization of whether a user has access to a document, or early binding, where the GSA holds a cache of existing policy information about who can access which documents. Second, if a business has multiple GSAs operating search, administrators can give more importance in search results to a particular appliance (engineering documents vs. marketing documents). Developers can also add an extra ranking framework to stack search results.

Google is also revving up search results in the GSA, adding social search features such as suggested search and user-added results, that aggregate knowledge across the organization for more precise search results. Additionally, users can now enable cross-language search, where the GSA will translate their search results in real-time into whichever language they choose.

Google now counts 25,000 enterprise search customers, up from last year’s 20,000 customers. Over half of customers use Google’s search appliance and the rest use its hosted site search and other enterprise products. Last year, Google added results based on personalization and Google Alerts functionality to the GSA. This year’s emphasis on scale and customization reinforces Google’s potentially strong enterprise strategy for both content inside the firewall and in the cloud.

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Jeff Victor of STARFLEET, the International Star Trek Fan Association, recently showed me around the 12,500-foot Star Trek exhibit at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. We laughed, we cried, we played a little Dabo. Good times indeed.

Star Trek at the Franklin Institute [FI.edu]

STARFLEET International Star Trek Fan Association [SFI.org]

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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