Tarpipe begins to tackle personal content overload

Thanks Mr. Cracknell at LittleLucifer for this post from cnet

Posted by Rafe Needleman

Tarpipe is one of the most curious experiments in social media that I've seen lately. It takes personal content (e-mail messages, primarily) as input, and can shunt it to one or more desinations, transforming it in the process. For example, I created a Tarpipe e-mail address that will take a pictures I send it and posts it to Flickr, update Twitter with a link to the Flickr page, and put the picture and the Twitter URL in an Evernote record for me. All I have to do is send the e-mail.

Tarpipe looks a lot like Yahoo Pipes. They work in similar ways: Users drag service and function boxes around on the workspace and connect them with blue tubes to control the flow of data. But Yahoo is about taking inputs from several sources and then creating a universal RSS output. Tarpipe is more about directly updating personal content services like Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed, Delicious, and Evernote, which Yahoo Pipes doesn't do. The service has the potential to be the answer to the lament I first talked about in The looming crisis: Personal syndication overload.

This workflow takes an e-mailed photo attachment, sends it to Flickr, posts a TinyURL link to it on Twitter, and archives the photo and the Twitter link in my Evernote account.

The app will currently update several personal services: The ones I mentioned, plus a few others like Tumblr, Plurk, and Jaiku. But one problem with the system right now is that, unless you are a programmer, it's inflexible as to inputs. You can e-mail Tarpipe items, and manipulate that data. You can also use an online form for input, but you cannot create complex workflows around form data, other than to direct it to the services you've connected to your account. (The developer interface is apparently quite robust, though.)

Twitterpipe: Coming
One thing end users can't do, at least not yet, is ask Tarpipe to monitor a personal RSS feed (like a Twitter account) and then process that for further transmission to other services. RSS "slurping" is coming, Tarpipe creator Bruno Pedro told me.

Tarpipe keeps a log of all the data it's handled for you.

That's one of the things I'm waiting for. I would like to continue to use the input methods I'm comfortable with (for Twitter, that means Twhirl) and have Tarpipe selectively send my output to other sources based on content (perhaps using hashtags).

The other thing I'm waiting for, which Pedro is working on, is community aggregation. When this is running, you'll be able to monitor and reply to your audience as they comment on your posts. This solves the issue of fractured community for people who contribute their work or thoughts to multiple sources. The concept is this: Tarpipe will track all the items it posts on your behalf. It will monitor those posts at their new homes for replies from other users. It will be able to notify you of those replies so you can participate in discussions that spring up. (Related: MyBlogLog; Typepad Comments.)

The system may also help you connect conversations together that are on different services. For example, if I use Tarpipe to post a photo to Flickr and a link to the photo on Twitter, and then the conversation picks up Twitter, Tarpipe may be able to attach that discussion to the Flickr page.

Pedro told me that Tarpipe may also get features to help its users meld their social networks together on the various services they are signed up for. He calls this the "unified social graph," and says, "You'll be able to follow your social network, invite your contacts to Tarpipe and send messages to specific people."

And finally, he's working on adding new content destinations to Tarpipe, like Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, Picasa, and video sharing services. Richer programmatic access (more APIs) is in the works, too.

An interesting effort
Tarpipe is not done. It's too hard to use, and key parts of its feature set have yet to be built. It is, though, an extremely interesting middleman service for handling what is becoming a real problem for a lot of people: Personal content management not just for what we read, but for what we create.

See also: Ping.fm, Pixelpipe, and Friendfeed.

Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai

Thanks CNN

(CNN) -- It was the day social media appeared to come of age and signaled itself as a news-gathering force to be reckoned with.

A wounded man is carried from the attacked rail station.

The minute news broke of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, social media sites like Twitter were inundated with a huge volume of messages.

With more than 6 million members worldwide, an estimated 80 messages, or "tweets," were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds, providing eyewitness accounts and updates.

Many Twitter users also sent pleas for blood donors to make their way to specific hospitals in Mumbai where doctors were faced with low stocks and rising casualties.

Others sent information about helplines and contact numbers for those who had friends and relatives caught up in the attacks. Tweeters were also mobilized to help with transcribing a list of the dead and injured from hospitals, which were quickly posted online.

As Twitter user "naomieve" wrote: "Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action."

Neha Viswanathan, a former regional editor for Southeast Asia and a volunteer at Global Voices, told CNN, "Even before I actually heard of it on the news I saw stuff about this on Twitter.

"People were sending in messages about what they were hearing. There were at least five or six blogs from people who were trapped, or who were very close to what happened."

One tweet from "Dupree" appeared to be coming from inside one of the hotels: "Mumbai terrorists are asking hotel reception for rooms of American citizens and holding them hostage on one floor."

A group of Mumbai-based bloggers turned their Metroblog into a news wire service, while the blog MumbaiHelp offered to help users get through to their family and friends in the city, or to get information about them, and has had a number of successes.

Flickr also proved a useful source of haunting images chronicling the aftermath of the attacks. Journalist Vinukumar Ranganathan's stream of photos were published by CNN and other major broadcasters. iReport.com: Are you there? Share your photos, videos and stories

A Google Map showing the key locations and buildings with links to news stories and eyewitness accounts, and CNN's iReporters flooded the site with their videos and images of the terror attacks.

However, as is the case with such widespread dissemination of information, a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies.

For example, a rumor that the Indian government was asking tweeters to stop live updates to avoid compromising its security efforts was published and republished on the site.

This was seemingly given credence by at least one major news Web site, which posted the tweet on its live update.

It read simply: "Indian government asks for live Twitter updates from Mumbai to cease immediately. ALL LIVE UPDATES - PLEASE STOP TWEETING."

Then it was suggested via Twitter that terrorists were using the medium to gain information about what Indian security forces were doing, which led to numerous abusive postings urging the terrorists to "die, die, die, if you're reading this."

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, "I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

"During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured - ranging up to 1,000."

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media.

Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information.

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Social Telly - a roundup of social viewing stuff

Thanks Simon for passing over this link to Roo Reynold's great post on social TV. Cool services making TV much more than the potato experience

Social Telly - a roundup of social viewing stuff
Posted by Roo - 25/11/08 at 10:11:22 pm

Television has always been a social thing. Whether it’s because you’re watching it with family and friends at home, watching football in the pub, chatting at school or work with friends about that programme that you all love the night before, television is about much more than a broadcast.

During the recent US election, I was being rather traditional, tucked up in bed listening to Radio 4 (quite different from my approach in the 2005 UK general election, when Nick and I were even live-blogging the action). While I was being sleepy and passive this year, my friend Jo was being social online. Here’s what her screen looked like, complete with live-streaming BBC News, IM chat and Twitter.

I’ve been building this list for ages, but it’s finally time for a roundup of social viewing tools. Here are some examples of how the web is being used to make different sorts of conversations possible around television:

Curation and communities

• There are a few blogs about television. Watchification is “selecting the really good stuff from the BBC iPlayer…” and other sources. (Disclaimer: I’m the tech geek behind the curtains at Watchification). Curation is interesting. By highlighting Twitter, Delicious and Flickr content, the tag pages are getting (IMHO) more useful too.

• Smashing Telly is “a hand edited collection of the best free, instantly available TV on the web”. Like Watchification, it’s an example of comments around curated programmes rather than live chat.

Social recommendations

• I keep hearing people asking ‘what’s the last.fm of television?’ Dan recently sent me an invite to Boxee, which apparently
  

  “gives you a true entertainment experience to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr.”

  I’ve only just started using it, and although it seems far from perfect it is only an alpha at this stage. The integration with other platforms, the desktop app and the last.fm-like scrobbling looks interesting.

• TIOTI has been around for a bit longer than Boxee. It invites you to:
  

  Find your favorite TV shows and brand new ones you’ll love, Share shows you like with your friends and see what they are watching, Download or stream TV shows from dozens of places online, Get involved and post your thoughts, improve our guide or add pics and vids.

Annotations

• YouTube started offering video annotations after Google acquired Omnisio but only (so far) gives the video uploader a way to add annotations to the video, so it’s not (yet?) a social annotation tool.
• Viddler, on the other hand, offer time-stamped comments and tagging, which are displayed along the video timeline and (by default) pop up at the appropriate time.

Playing the backchannel

• CurrentTV recently partnered with Twitter to display relevant Twitter updates live on-screen. Discuss the presidential debates while watching it (using Twitter tags) and have your comment displayed on TV.

• MTV’s Backchannel takes a different approach to annotating episodes of The Hills, turning the process of ‘tagging’ and ‘clicking’, to endorse a tag, into a game. Playing Backchannel won’t (as far as I can tell) stream the show to you, you just play in the browser while you’re watching the show at the same time.

Live chat

• When I think of live chat around TV, I think of Joost. Joost’s ‘channel chat’ has been overhauled a couple of times since the early days (I seem to remember it being initially based on IRC, then in 2007 they announced a partnership with Meebo) and more recently it seems to have gone away completely since they moved to Flash (or am I missing it?).

• BanterTV combines iPlayer simulcast embeds with real-time chat.

• The Electric Sheep Company’s WebFlock provides features for social viewing including
  

  a visually immersive environment for social interaction, media consumption and game play

• Lycos Cinema is “is Synchronized Movie Watching” (complete with a frankly horrible introductory video) and invites you to
  

  Watch thousands of movies and tv shows with your friends and chat live while you watch.

• What about the BBC? Anthony Rose recently announced some prototype work with Microsoft, in which iPlayer was hooked up to Windows Live Mesh. This was announced recently at Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference and blogged in more detail by Microsoft’s Marc Holmes. Strategic, or experiment? You decide.

Of all of them, I find the asychronous chat using comments in the timeline on Viddler, and the game-playing elements of MTV’s Backchannel to be the most interesting. There must be lots of examples I’ve missed, but it’s an area I’ll continue to watch with interest.

Optimizing your twitter experience, stream and reach

Thanks Tim at Between 0 and 1 for these insights on getting the best out of twitter

November 26, 2008 · No Comments

I have rarely trawled through the thumbnail gallery of my twitter contacts, even the list view without search or other filtering/search function is less than pleasant. I happen to stumble upon new people to follow and have absolutely no idea how exactly new and exotic followers like BrooklynPride (Organizer and Producer of Brooklyn’s Annual Gay Pride Celebration) find me. Now here comes Mr.Tweet. Not only is this a cute name (in the spirit of La Linea or Fatso the Wombat), this is also a good service that might get you more meaningful tweets onto the radar.

Follow Mr. Tweet on Twitter, tweet him “who should i follow” and get a nifty analysis back that allows you to pick some people that seem relevant to your interests and network - the latest tweets, location, follow/follower-ratio and tweet-intensity of that particular person is included.

Mr Tweet analysis

You still have to make your mind up whether following a blabbermouth like Scobleizer is worth your attention. Mr.Tweet is still in alpha so I am expecting more meaningful, weighted suggestions and features.

Ideally, Tweetdeck , Twitterific and similar apps will combine this sort of suggestion function together with a stats tool like Tweetrush. After all, we want to reassured that our audience finds us important, no? I was particularly fond of the geekiness and visual appeal of POPrl’s analysis of click through rates to your tweeted links.

POPrl stats on my tweet click through

I also saw twitter apps Twitsig promoting your tweets as images on forums and in emails. Eunmac was trying to integrate this into Outlook and I reckon that improves reach with every email sent… but at the same time, I fear that this would take away some of the early charm. The relative intimacy and thoughtfulness of our current circles would sit uneasily with the work related tediousness of Outlook.

And unless you are Britney Spears and hire a full-time Twitter P.A. (what a job description: “Must be able to twitter even when on the loo!”), there just is no scale to Twittertime!

Twitsig image of my twitter stream

I would be keen to know what your favourite twitter apps and extensions are? Maybe that’s a question I’d better tweet…

---

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Categories: Social Media · apps
Tagged: tools, twitter, reach, mr.tweet, optmization

SnapAds: Survival Of The Fittest Meets Madison Avenue

Thanks TechCrunch for this outline of SnapAds, a new offering in the automated, multivairant ad delivery market. Looks useful, but not sure how they compare to something like memetircs

It’s rare to hear about genetics and advertising platforms in the same sentence, but new startup SnapAds has put together an ad service that effectively combines the theory of natural selection with banner ads - with very impressive results. The startup, which shares a number of founders with Weebly (though the two companies are unrelated), has created a system that dynamically adjusts the appearance of banner ads over time to maximize engagement. And it seems to work - a three day trial campaign for a recent film saw an increased clickthrough rate of 1922% over three days (not a typo).

To create a campaign, advertisers provide SnapAds with a special Photoshop file containing a number of specially-tagged layers with all of the art and text assets they’d like to potentially display in their banner. Advertisers can create rule sets specifying which layers are allowed to appear together, allowing them to ensure that SnapAds never generates an ad that is nonsensical or potentially offensive. Once all of the rules and assets are in place, the platform can get to work.

SnapAds - Display Ad Optimization from SnapAds on Vimeo.

The process initially begins by displaying ads with a smattering of random combinations of the assets. As time goes by, the system identifies the most successful ads and allows these to “live on”, further modifying them towards perfection as the failures die off. Co-Founder David Rusenko says that a fully refined ad takes around one million impressions, but that the system never stops optimizing. Because user interest in an ad will typically wane after it’s been seen multiple times, SnapAds will continue to modify the ad indefinitely. The platform can also recognize when certain ads are more successful at different times, and will keep multiple branches of an ad “alive”, showing each at the appropriate time.

Rusenko says that to use the service advertisers will need campaigns consisting of at least 1 million impressions (SnapAds is not currently self-service), and that each ad is recommended to have 3-6 variables with 2-8 possible values each. Today’s announcement coincides with the launch of a SnapAds-powered campaign on Reddit and Wired for the AXE Detailer (man loofah).

While the initial results are promising, it’s too early to tell just how successful SnapAds will be. The system isn’t magic - it can’t automatically generate a new, especially appealing button or image. These assets will all need to be provided by the advertiser, and if there is nothing innovative to work with, SnapAds will only be able to offer slightly different permutations of the same generic ad. That said, provided the ad agencies can come up with a little creativity, the SnapAds service could prove to be very successful.

What the Semantic Web -- or Web 3.0 -- Can Do for Marketers

Thanks adage for this article on marketing applications of web 3.0 - bring on the relevance!

Whatever You Call It, Get Ready for Greater Relevance

Posted by Marta Strickland on 11.24.08 @ 03:16 PM

It's been nearly 10 years since Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the worldwide web, expressed his vision of a "semantic web," in which all web data -- and the meaning of that data -- could be read by machines. Since then, much of the slow-moving progress toward this smarter and more powerful web has been courtesy of academics and data librarians.

Recently, however, the semantic web has been enjoying a commercial revival of sorts and is often referred to by the new buzzword "Web 3.0." Given how insane the pace of life is these days, I thought I'd offer a few thoughts on what I've been learning about it.

Since I can already feel the rising tide of negative comments as that version number graces the screen, bear with me for a second. Semantic web is just one of a few things often referred to as Web 3.0 -- others include topics like data portability or mobile web. But I think entrepreneur Nova Spivack offered the most useful definition by simply calling it the third decade of the web (2010 to 2020) and referring to the technology trends that will hit maturity during that time. Most importantly, the next generation of the web will bring us out of information overload and be more relevant and meaningful.

But Web 3.0 is not just about improving the consumer experience. And it isn't some industry ploy to sell you more services. The next-generation web -- the semantic web -- aims to solve some of today's biggest problems in marketing.

So what is it? Well, semantics refers to the meaning behind data. Right now, computers are good at sending data back and forth but not great at discerning the meaning of that data. Semantic web aims to change that. Perhaps it's best explained in describing what marketers can hope to gain from it.

Improving Ads
Has your contextual advertising turned into a contextual nightmare? Current contextual advertising depends heavily on keywords. Sure, it seems safe to buy a word like "feet" -- until your ad comes up right next to a story about severed feet. What if there were a technology that could analyze what is really being said on the page?

By using natural language processing and artificial intelligence, semantic advertising solutions, like Peer39, can look at the structure of a sentence and interpret word meaning and sentiment. Semantic text analysis relies on synonyms and relationships between concepts, rather than rudimentary keyword scanning. Identifying sentiment is becoming invaluable for advertising on user-generated sites such as blogs, where you wouldn't want to place ads on a negative post.

Online advertising has another obstacle to overcome: information overload. We live in a world where information evolves at an alarming rate and, let's face it, consumers trust each other far more than they trust advertising messaging. So how do we dynamically pull smarter and more relevant content into ads?

That's where the efforts like Dapper MashupAds come into play. In addition to pulling from a brand site database, the dynamically generated ads can scan social content sites like Yelp and Flickr for the newest (positive) reviews and photos of your restaurant. It's the power of your brand message only promoted by your consumers.

Improving Measurement
One of the toughest marketing challenges of recent times has been in measuring the success of social media. How do you measure the success of a human conversation? We can measure reach (visits, views, clicks, downloads). We can also measure exposure or buzz (what people are saying about our brand). But it's inside those walled gardens that everything interesting is happening: How strong is the community? Are members active? Are we changing their minds? Changing their actions?

It's the tough nut of the new marketing conversation, but Web 3.0 might be the key to cracking it.

Semantic technology is able to pull together connections between words and phrases. How often is concept "X" said in the same breath as concept "Y"? Measurement tools will be moving away from the tag cloud, and we'll be able to immerse ourselves in the trends of the real conversation, not just the keyword of the day.

Next, there is the dilemma of message velocity; i.e., how far is my message traveling and how fast? Sure, that's an easy thing to do when you are measuring a viral video or widget but what about a conversation? Semantic technology builds on meaning, not keywords. And so it doesn't matter if your followers say, "The new Batman movie is going to be awesome" or "You have to see the 'Dark Knight' trailer"; semantic buzz tools will tie the conversation together.

Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular tool in the marketer toolbox. And its next generation will look at the entirety of a comment or an article, from whom it came and to whom it was directed. It will use natural language processing and analysis of meaningful relationships to distinguish the "good" comments from "bad."

And what about building a community of loyal enthusiasts? What about creating a relationship with your customers? Companies like Chat Mine measure the connections between members of the community and between people and concepts. By looking at both friending and popular dialogue, it can tell you if your brand brought a community together in passionate conversation.

When O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0, the marketing world divided into skeptics and enthusiasts. And a wave of start-ups began rolling out under the 2.0 moniker. It's only wise to fear the same for semantic web or Web 3.0. As nightmares of books and white papers race through your mind, it's important to separate the reality from the hype.

The successful technologist won't approach the marketer with buzzwords. He won't throw out phrases like "dynamic ontologies" or "semantic triples." Because good semantic technology is like movie editing -- you aren't supposed to notice it's there but it fundamentally changes the experience. So when someone approaches you about a "smarter" semantic solution, make sure they can answer this:

How will this make my ads more relevant and my metrics more meaningful?

~~~

Marta Strickland is manager of social-media strategy at Organic, Detroit, where she defines best practices on emerging technology trends and discovers new ways to use social media to connect with consumers for brands including Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Bank of America and Geek Squad. She voices her mind and evangelizes the power of social media as editor in chief of the Organic blog ThreeMinds. Prior to Organic, she was interactive strategist for Q LTD, a strategic design consultancy in Ann Arbor, Mich.