Since we first began work on Streamified in November of 2011, the Streamified team has endeavored to make social media and news more accessible on the web and mobile devices. It's been an amazing journey, and to all our users: thank you!
We will be winding down the Streamified service by the middle of this month (as of Monday, July 15th, 2013) so we can focus on new challenges and opportunities at Airbnb. The Streamified service will cease to function, and existing customers should take this opportunity to cancel their accounts and find a new social media solution.
We want to give special thanks to all our investors and backers (financial and otherwise) through these last 18 months. Without the input of many different voices, Streamified would not be where it is at today.
I love automation. So, when our sales lead at Streamified told me that he was spending a huge amount of his time crawling through Twitter and other social networks for "cold" sales leads, I realized that I needed to do something.
In less than 6 hours, I built LeadListCreator.com, which does the work of finding a Twitter user on LinkedIn for you. The process is pretty simple, really: it does a Twitter search, and then lets you click on interesting users to cross reference them against LinkedIn.
The only "magic" here is that it's comparing profiles on a number of dimensions to create a "confidence" score. For example, after searching for the name "Joe Bob" on LinkedIn, it will compare each result's bio, geographic location, job history, etc. against the Twitter profile. The higher the intersection between the data, the better the chances that the user is who we are looking for.
Enjoy!
This post was by Zane Claes, the founder and lead programmer of Streamified.
Streamified and LinkedIn: Shares, Likes, and Comments
We're constantly working to improve our integration with all the social networks we support. Today, we rolled out a few changes to LinkedIn.
Now, you can like and comment on posts from your LinkedIn stream. We're still working on reaching out to LinkedIn to allow us to support company pages (they've only given us access to personal profiles so far).
The Future of Social Reading is NOT another Reader
In the wake of the Google Reader shutdown, many people in the social spheres are wondering what is going to rise up to fill the gaps. Many have pointed to Feedly or other news reading apps. Lifehacker even did a post about the 5 best Google Reader replacements.
In the tech realm, though, many are discussing the format known as "RSS" itself. This is the method by which bloggers and content creators have been able to "syndicate" their content for over a decade now. Fundamentally, each of the reader apps above are just tapping in to these RSS feeds.
However, RSS is archaic. It's too hard for users to go about adding RSS feeds themselves; the vast majority of computer users don't even know what a RSS feed is. On the other hand, replacing RSS with a new format/tool would be difficult. The format is far too well-embedded into the web ecosystem to go away any time soon. You'd need to convince literally millions of website owners to switch over to something new.
The solution is neither a new format, nor a new reader. We can't plaster over the major shortcomings of RSS with a mere pretty UI/UX. A good start towards fixing the problem would be an API similar to the backend behind Google Reader, complete with full articles and rich media in a portable format (read: not embedded HTML). Of course, we can't start from scratch: such an API would need millions of articles already in the system, and more added each day. What we need is a social-aware infrastructure (integrating not just with existing news feeds, but social networks and sharing features as well) that combines all these disparate sources.
We've been building exactly this API for the last 18 months, and it is already being used by our corporate partners. We've used EC2, RightScale, and node.js for maximum scalability, and it every day it handles millions of feed items. Today, we've officially released the Streamified API to the general public, and you can start using it for free.
The Streamified API does a huge amount of leg work to combine existing RSS feeds alongside a user's social streams.
It presents the posts in a way which is predictable and "normalized."
Each post is a full news article, instead of tiny summaries, snippets etc.
Media is delivered in a way that makes sense: images, videos, etc. are each JSON objects, rather than HTML strings embedded within the text.
Every post contains categories, tags, sentiment, language, and other useful metadata.
All this data is searchable, thanks to ElasticSearch on the backend.
This puts the power in the hands of the developers to create a UI that makes sense, rather than hoping that the RSS feed provides a pretty bit of HTML. You could just as easily make a native mobile app which looks great on a tiny screen as you could build a web app. You could choose to integrate social features, or you could leave them out. It's all there.
In other words, it is a system which takes the entire social web (news and social networks) and combines them into something that can be accessed and manipulated with a minimal amount of effort.
Instead of dozens of social networks and millions of nonconforming RSS feeds, there is just one Streamified.
There is a 1,000 request/day courtesy limit for all new applications in the API. Developers can contact us to discuss increasing it, but for obvious reasons we can't release a completely unlimited API.
This editorial is by Zane Claes, the founder of Streamified. He can be reached via Twitter @inZania. If you liked it, your shares are much appreciated (the share button is to the lower-right).
Did you know that with Streamified’s Premium, Professional, and Enterprise subscriptions, you can create customized alerts? In today’s blog post, Justine looks at using Streamified’s powerful search to create an alert for whenever your accounts are mentioned on social media or whenever you receive a new Facebook notification.
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Everyone’s needs are different, but everyone likes saving time! One way to do so is to let Streamified notify you of important occurrences in your news and social media.
Because we built alerts as a component of Streamified’s powerful search features, there are a ton of possibilities. All it takes is a few minutes to get familiar with how to set up and save alerts.
Here’s a few ideas to get you thinking…
Set up an alert for your mentions on social media
Be alerted whenever your favorite blog or RSS feed posts new content
Track mentions of your brand or product name, everywhere
Track mentions of your brand or product name in a specific geolocation
Get alerts whenever there’s negative sentiment posted about a specific product
Get alerts when a video is posted that is related to your brand or product name
Today, we’ll begin by going over how to create an alert for your mentions and engagement.
Let’s get started!
Click on full search on the left-side menu. Setting up your alert in this menu will allow you to customize exactly what streams or posts you want to see and receive alerts about.
Since right now we just want to set up an alert for your engagement (think Facebook notifications and Twitter or ADN mentions), let’s leave the field at the top blank. Right now, we’re opting instead to just narrow down the streams that we want to see and be alerted about.
On the right of the field at the top, you should see something that says “Search [_ Social Streams]”; the _ will be your personalized number of social media streams that you’ve attached to your Streamified account. Click on this; it’s a link.
A new menu will appear, displaying all of your social media streams. Some of them have a down-facing arrow next to them. Click on those in order to drill-down to sub-streams. In this case, this is exactly what we want; your Facebook, Twitter, and ADN engagement will be in sub-streams of your respective Facebook, Twitter, and ADN accounts. Then pick and choose the sub-streams you want to include in your alert. (It may be easiest to click “Deselect All” at the bottom, then select the sub-streams you want, if you have a lot of streams.)
Click on Done at the bottom. This will return you to the search view.
This is pretty much all you need to do to set up an engagement alert. Since we’re setting up a search for those specific streams, you’ll now be alerted whenever the search finds a new post within those streams. To finish up, click to enable the “Save as an alert” option at the bottom left, then click on Search in the bottom right.
One last menu will appear, prompting you to name your Alert. This will help you keep all of them clear.
You can also, optionally, receive a daily summary email of all of the posts that fit your alert criteria.
Click “Create Alert” to finish up.
You’ll be alerted of new posts that fit your alert criteria by clicking on “Alerts” in the left-side menu. Here’s also where you can click on those posts to view them individually, or mark them all as read. Lastly, you can also manage your alerts by clicking on “Saved Searches” in the left-side menu.
Curious about Streamified? Let us know! Feel free to email us for more information or try Streamified out yourself at http://streamified.me.
Did you know that with Streamified’s Professional and Enterprise subscriptions, you can analyze any of your streams or search results to learn more about the contents? In today’s blog post, Justine looks at using Streamified’s analytics tools to learn more about when followers are engaging.
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Curious about how when the people you’re following on Twitter are most active or when they're mentioning your account the most?
Navigate to the stream you'd like to analyze, then click on “Analytics” in the left-side menu. Then click on “Stream” and “number of posts.” We like the “calendar heat map” option because it lets you see a breakdown by hour and date, though you can check out the line charts too, of course.
For example, it looks like Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays are especially high in volume for this stream and that 6AM, 9AM, 12PM, and 8PM PST are the best times for volume as well. Interesting!
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If you have multiple accounts for your brand’s presence, you can take this one step further and create a report for the sake of comparison, directly within Streamified. (Please note that this feature is only available to Streamified Enterprise subscribers.)
While still viewing your analytics, click on “Add to Report” in the bottom right to do just that. Name your chart, then click on “Import.” You’ll then see it in your Report. Then repeat this process until you have all the charts you want. Give your report some text so viewers know what you’re looking at, then add the insights you've gleaned from the charts you've created.
Curious about Streamified? Let us know! Feel free to email us for more information or try Streamified out yourself at http://streamified.me.
Streamified now supports adding your own personal Pinterest stream!
Pinterest is now a fully supported option under "Social Networks" when you click to add a stream. Just log in with your Pinterest credentials and pins from the boards that you're following will now appear in Streamified! Whether you're pinning for fun or for business, you can now view pins, repin to your own boards, like pins, or even upload your own pins to your own boards directly within Streamified!
Let us know what you think by leaving a message with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or App.net. Need support? Let us know at GetSatisfaction.
Streamified Recipes: Finding Related Tags & Keywords
Did you know that with Streamified’s Professional and Enterprise subscriptions, you can analyze any of your streams or search results to learn more about the contents? In today's blog post, Justine looks at using Streamified's analytics tools to learn more about followers' interests.
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Optimizing your content for keywords and tags can be a great way to make sure that new people can find your content when searching. The same thing is true for social media, too.
If you blog about specific topics and you’d like to make them findable on Twitter and other social networks, including relevant hashtags in your posts when sharing links to your blog can be a tactic to consider.
In the screen cap below, you can see an analytics chart I created for a specific hashtag that I see in my Twitter stream a lot - #musedchat.
Here’s what I did:
I navigated to the stream I wanted to analyze - in this case, my Twitter stream.
I clicked “Analytics” on the left-side menu and made sure “Streams” was selected at the top.
I selected “related tags/keywords analysis” and then the tag/keyword that I wanted to analyze.
Now I can see that if I write a blog post on topics like “music education,” “musical theatre,” and “music,” it may be of interest to people who track the #musedchat hashtag. This may be a hashtag that I want to include.
I can also see that #musiced and #musedchat are related hashtags. I might want to include that hashtag when sharing my post, too.
Bonus: If you’re a Streamified Enterprise user, you can also click “Add to Report” to save any charts to your own personalized report!
Curious about Streamified? Let us know! Feel free to email us for more information or try Streamified out yourself at http://streamified.me.
We first got our feet wet in developing for social media simplification in 2011, with an extension known as Start Google Plus. SGPlus was the result of a desire to be able to streamline the management of multiple social presences and better integrate Google+ with other social networks. Zane’s weekend project quickly became a success and directly led to the beginning of Streamified Inc., in November 2011.
Now, almost 2 years later, we’ve made the hard decision to partially shutter the browser extension. There were a few big reasons behind this call.
The many changes that Google has made to its products, both Google+ itself and the Chrome Web Store, made it difficult to continue to maintain a high quality browser extension. Also, limited programming resources (for the last few months, up until just recently, Zane was our only developer) meant that updating the browser extension in the face of the mutable nature of Google+ put a strain on our team and delayed updates.
As a result, we will try to keep the browser extension updated when able, but it is no longer a supported Streamified product.
What About Mobile?
If you’ve visited our website recently, you’ll also note that links to our apps for Android and iOS have been removed. Both of these apps were not functioning to our standards and we chose to remove them from the platforms’ respective app markets in the meantime, rather than letting them persist to give you a less than optimal experience on mobile. We do plan to rerelease them as soon as possible and we will keep you updated here with our progress.
Let Us Know…
We’re sure you may have questions or comments about these changes to the Streamified suite. Please feel free to get in touch with us by leaving a comment below.
We're excited to share that after a few months' developing, we're able to announce Streamified Enterprise!
Streamified Enterprise is our highest subscription level and is targeted towards social media managers.
We've thought long and hard about what our dream social media management dashboard would look like. What features were 'must-haves'? What features have we always wanted, but never been able to find? What would make our lives easier?
With a Streamified Enterprise plan, you can now:
Listen to the pulse of relevant social media and news with advanced search filters and alerts
Measure your social media performance and identify ways to expand the reach of your business
Engage your audience efficiently with cross-posting, scheduled posts, and team collaboration
Streamified Enterprise is accessible from our web app, Streamified.me, and our Mac OS X app; to learn more about Streamified Enterprise, check out this walkthrough, built with Streamified Enterprise's new reporting feature!
If you're interested in a trial of Streamified Enterprise, please let us know by contacting us directly at [email protected]. We're looking forward to hearing from you!
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