Discover Top Posts Tagged with #backtype

Great overview of Nathan Marz's architecture first employed at BackType.

How much traffic does your website receive from Twitter? Twitter Web Analytics, a new tool announced Tuesday, should help provide some clarity to website owners who rely on the information network for content distribution.

Twitter Web Analytics is intended to give website owners more data on the effectiveness of their Twitter integrations. It’s powered by BackType, the social analytics company that Twitter acquired in July.

Twitter Web Analytics, explains BackType founder and new Twitter platform staffer Christopher Golda, will help publishers and website owners understand three key things: How much of their content is being shared on Twitter, how much traffic Twitter is sending their way and how well Tweet Buttons are performing.

The tool is free and currently in beta. A small group of partners will gain access to Twitter Web Analytics this week, and Twitter will roll it out to all website owners in a few weeks. An API will also be released for developers.

#analytics #twitter #mashable #BackType

This Week In Social:

Facebook Chat Announcements, BackType Acquired by Twitter, 2 Million HootSuite Users, Timberlake The New Cowell?, Eminem Sends Fans to Hell & An Elaborate Recruitment Drive

Facebooks Big Announcement

Over the last year, the Facebook messages team has been working to make it easier to have one on one conversations with your friends. In November, Facebook launched the new messages, which brings together your chats, texts, emails and messages all in one place. On Wednesday they announced they are introducing video calling and other improvements to chat. The new chat design includes a sidebar that lists the people you message most. Now it's easier to find your friends and start a conversation. The sidebar adjusts with the size of your browser window, and it automatically appears when the window is wide enough.

Facebook Group Chat

The group chat announcement comes as an add-on to Facebook’s already existing chat function. When you’re chatting with a friend on your Facebook page, a button allows you to add other friends to the chat. Finally, the company redesigned the chat window, so your Friends list can now vary in size relative to your browser window. A list of friends who are online will appear, as well as those who are offline that you message with the most.

You can read more on Wired.

Twitter Acquire BackType

This week it was announced that BackType has been acquired by Twitter! BackType will be bringing their team and technology to Twitter’s platform team, where their focus will be on developing tools for Twitter’s publisher partners. BackType's aim has always been to help their customers understand the value of engagement on Twitter and other social platforms. They also created BackTweets to help publishers understand the reach of their tweets and content, who they are reaching, and how Tweets convert to web traffic, sales and other KPIs.

HootSuite Hits 2 Million

See the full gallery on Posterous

HootSuite, the social media dashboard and analytics tool, has reached a new milestone: 2 million users. Invoke Media released HootSuite in December 2008 and it is widely used by individuals as well as organizations, governments and businesses. The White House, SXSW, Zappos and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia all use HootSuite, according to the company. HootSuite hit the 1 million-user milestone in November 2010. Consumers and businesses have shared some 500 million messages to date.

MySpace Talent Show

Timberlake reportedly is mulling turning the faltering social network site into a platform to find new talent, possibly through some kind of competition show. While details are scarce, the idea has the potential to become a key part of the future of entertainment – and sounds like a natural step for Timberlake. Between his music career, his well-received role in “The Social Network,” his knack for comedy as seen on “Saturday Night Live” and his Web dealings, Timberlake has become kind of an Internet-era Kevin Bacon, with few degrees of separation between him and the various tentacles of entertainment media.

You can read more on NBC.

Eminem Sends Facebook Users to Hell

Rapper Eminem recently released an EP titled Hell: The Sequel with his side project, Bad Meets Evil, a hip-hip duo including Royce Da 5’9. To celebrate, Eminem is launching a violent Facebook game. The aim of the game (developed by Grab) is pretty simple: Become so evil that you go to hell. Users choose an avatar while tracks from the EP play. Then they gain points (by watching music videos and interviews or spending Facebook Credits) in order to buy weapons. Players use the weapons to kill friends. Get enough points and kills, and you get to go to hell.

You can read more on Mashable.

Owen Hargreaves YouTube Fitness

Owen Hargreaves has launched a bid to prove his fitness - by posting daily exercise videos on YouTube. The 30-year-old midfielder is currently without a club after being released by Manchester United in May. Hargreaves was plagued by injuries during his four years at Old Trafford, making only 39 appearances after signing from Bayern Munich for £17m. Looks like he could do with some proper shorts though.

You can read more on BBC.

Some really cool announcements by Facebook this week. Have you tried the video chat feature? Can Justin Timberlake make a success of MySpace? Will we see social media used more often by job seekers? Lets us know your thoughts in the comments section below...

We are mycleveragency

#backtype #bbc #eminem #facebook #Hootsuite #justin timberlake #mashable #myspace #nbc #skype #twitter #Wired #youtube

Twitter acquires Backtype

Twitter recently acquired backtype, a social media analysis company. Backtype provided all kinds of analysis and metrics to help companies analyze their performance on Twitter. With this acquisition, Twitter is continuing to incorporate services and know-how which has so far been provided by third parties. Previous examples were Summize for the real-time search back in 2008, TweetDeck for its Twitter client, and now backtype.

Backtype has been working on a number of projects to bring real-time analysis to a Hadoop cluster, including ElephantDB, a databased for exporting key-value data from Hadoop, Storm, a real-time analysis framework based on Hadoop, and Cascalog, a clojure based query language for Hadoop.

Current accounts at Backtype will continue to exist, but backtype already announced that they will stop to start new accounts.

From a view point of Twitter, I think this strategy makes perfect sense: First you provide rather open access to your data such that startups can start building interesting new products. Then you can pick the most interesting projects and incorporate them into Twitter. Basically, there is a lot of development of new ideas which is financed by the startup industry and which comes for free for Twitter, except for the winner, of course.

What has me worried is Twitter's tendency in the past to openly discourage people from continuing to work in a field once they have acquired the relevant technology themselves, as has already happened with Twitter clients. Is the same going to happen with trending and social analysis tools next?

Twitter has always attracted people building new products and services because access to the data was relatively easy. However, this might change in the future if Twitter establishes a track record of closing down areas once it has what it thinks it needs, and people might become interested in more open platforms.

^MB

#twitter #backtype #social media analysis

Twitter Acquires BackType

BackType was a premier service that told its customers how their tweets were being propagated through Twitter and it also gave them information about influential people on Twitter for a company or a product. This information is invaluable for marketing companies and would eventually earn a lot of money for Twitter.

#twitter #Backtype #acuisition #facebook #social network

Celebrating Canadian Startup Success Stories

Today I was happy to see two announcements about Canadian companies. First, Vancouver startup (is it still a startup?) Hootsuite reached 2 million members, and created a fun Infographic to show some stats about its usage.

Second, the news that Twitter has acquired Toronto startup Backtype. Founders Chris Golda and Mike Montano were in a past YCombinator class, then were based in Toronto for a while (where they demo'd at a Sprout Up and made it on my BlogTO list of the hottest startups of 2009) until they relocated to San Francisco. They're both really nice guys with a solid product so I'm happy to see them successfully exit.

Also a shout-out to one of my favourite Toronto-based startups, personal safety app Guardly. Founder Josh Sookman wrote a post outlining the ups and downs of their first 300 days. I'll be watching their progress closely!

Add that to the recent acquisitions of TinyHippos by RIM and Postrank by Google in Waterloo, and it's good news all around.

Sure, Toronto's not Silicon Valley. And sure, our talent sometimes leaves to go to Silicon Valley (the dreaded brain drain). But whether an entrepreneur starts, builds or sells their company while on Canadian soil, I still consider it a homegrown success story. And I'll be watching for the next crop of success stories.

#guardly #hootsuite #backtype

ElephantDB and Storm Join the Twitter Flock

That’s to say BackType, creators of Cascalog, ElephantDB, and Storm , has been acquired by Twitter (which in case you didn’t know names most of their open source libraries and storage solutions using bird names).

The announcement is here . Looking forward to seeing Storm open sourced.

#BackType #ElephantDB #Storm #Cascalog #Twitter

BackType's ElephantDB

I didn’t know BackType’s ElephantDB is open source and available on GitHub, same as their Cascalog the Clojure based query language for Hadoop.

#ElephantDB #BackType #Cascalog