The web moves fast enough that we may as well start looking at what comes next. Easy to use and affordable tools like Radian6 and ScoutLabs that track blog and twitter mentions are a given - but what kinds of crazy innovations can we hope for in the future?

Here's what we're thinking that might look like. We base these predictions in part on a conversation with Chris Golda of social media discussion search engine Backtype. Backtype is used under the hood at Radian6 and the company just announced a new partnership with Filterbox today. For an in-depth look at some of these kinds of services, see Social Media Monitoring Grudge Match: Radian6 vs. Scout Labs by Jason Falls. In house we use FriendFeed search a lot.

None of our predictions for the future are terribly shocking; to some degree they are just further developments of the same core value propositions these services already focus on. Hopefully this discussion will help spur some original thinking on your part, readers, and you can throw some suggestions for the future of the industry out in comments.

More Sources, Especially Facebook

The most obvious place for social media monitoring tools to go next is into Facebook. Twitter is the primary target for analysis right now because it's wide open and programmatically accessible. It's also 10% the size of Facebook. We're not sure whether Facebook is going to open up further or if monitoring tools are going to find a way to get around the fundamentally closed nature of the site to at least sample the conversations going on there. Can you imagine a monitoring company paying a wildly popular Facebook user to open up access to their newsfeed to monitoring? We can; it's a surprise that it's not already happening.

There's also a lot of multimedia to monitor, including television and radio content that is increasingly easy to find online. We expect that speech-to-text search services like Everyzing will find a place in the social media monitoring technology toolkit in the near future.

Source Analysis

Backtype's Chris Golda says that his company is working on more sophisticated analysis of participants in discovered conversations. If Robert Scoble says something bad about your company in comments, that's probably going to go further than if someone with a relatively small circle of connections does.

This is something that all the monitoring companies do now but it's relatively crude. We can imagine a much more sophisticated analysis. For every person online - primary circles of friends, semantic analysis of areas of interest and personal background information are all readily available in tools like Mailana, Twazzup, Calais (disclosure: RWW sponsor) and Headup. Imagine that information served up in an interface like Apture, but for every person and conversation on the web.

This is the kind of thing that data portability makes easier - when people travel around the web with their profiles and data with them, they are easier to get to know in a hurry. That's true for both the technologies that would serve up personalized content and the companies that would monitor what we do.

Conversation Discovery

If it's all about "joining the conversation," one of the biggest challenges for organizations jumping into social media is finding and prioritizing all the conversations available. Golda says that Backtype is working on becoming "like Compete for communities." Postrank is doing something like this already; it's discovering the most "engaging" blogs on a wide variety of topics. It's still ridiculously difficult to identify the most important sites of conversation on a given topic though. That's a problem ripe for solving.

We'd also like to see some real-time threshold monitoring. Let me know the moment that conversation about me or a given topic hits a certain level of intensity.

Those are some of the things we expect to see come to the world of social media monitoring in the near future. What else do you expect - or what would you really like to see?

However, here's the beauty of using BackTweets search directly: You can put in any partial or complete URL and get a useful result.  Go ahead and search for readwriteweb or backtype. You will get all tweets with a URL that contains what you are searching for. This means that as a general indicator of buzz on Twitter, you can cast your net even wider using BackTweets than you can with BackType Connect. Plus, this is something that Twitter Search is almost completely blind to - compressed (or shortened, or shrunk) URLs. BackType expands all URLs before they get stored so your search results will always contain all the tweets, no matter what service is used to make the URL shorter in the tweet.

This is all good news. But we would like to point out a couple of features that seem to be lacking. First, the biggest oversight is RSS support. Visually, searches performed on BackTweets look very similar to results from Twitter Search (down to the notification that new results have appeared). But once you are satisfied with your search term, there's no way of grabbing a feed of it and dropping it in to a feed reader or other utility. Second, and somewhat related, there does not seem to be an open API to get these results either.

We can understand the lack of an API, based on BackTweets status primarily as an ancillary search engine for BackType Connect. But it is frustrating that we can't get a feed of our search results. Hopefully this was more of an oversight rather than a deliberate decision, because without it BackTweets, as an external search interface, is more of a technical demo than an extensible tool.

Update: Mike Montano (@michaelmontano) of BackType commented to let us now that an RSS feed and an API are both in the works! This is great news! Thanks, Mike!]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/backtweets_searches_what_twitter_cant_short_urls.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/backtweets_searches_what_twitter_cant_short_urls.php News Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:30:00 -0800 Phil Glockner Conversation tracking service Co.mments has announced this morning that it will cease operations at the end of the week, one month before its 3rd anniversary online. The service was at one time reviewed favorably compared to similar services that have gone on to be acquired or funded by investors. A respectable number of users quickly bemoaned the decision in comments on the company blog.

Thousands of services are launched online every year and only a small number of those prove to have as much longevity. Today's new paradigm trailblazer will often be tomorrow's dead-end hassle for its developer. Such is the nature of a rapidly iterating web and such is the fate of Co.mments.

There's a reason why so many people start comment tracking companies - online comments are filled with valuable user data and there's a compelling human element to keeping track of responses to what you've said on blogs. It's not hard to imagine Facebook Connect owning this space within a year, though. We're cheering, none the less, for open standards in the portable identity, data and contacts sphere.

Co.mments hasn't announced any plan for users to export their data. Update: The company just posted instructions on how to export your tracking data.

Project founder Assaf Arkin has a day job as the CTO of open source business process management company Intalio. You can track his other development work at GitHub.

BackType Subscriptions sends you an e-mail with updates that you can choose to receive as they happen, daily or weekly. Subscriptions is also offered via RSS. While most blogging platforms already offer a similar service, BackType fills the gap for those that don't.

With the amount of people socializing on the Web and leaving comments across the blogosphere, online reputation management is crucial. Not keeping up means you may miss out on important conversations about you or your brand - especially when they occur in the comment sections. Just look at the recent controversy surrounding Motrin.

Monitor Comments Across the Web

BackType can monitor comments you leave, or it can monitor comments that a person you specify leaves across the Web. Brilliant if you're interested in knowing what someone is talking about online, or if you want to know which sites they're commenting on. It also offers a search function by keyword letting you see at a glance how often your keyword appears in comments, where it appears and gives you an easy way to reply.

How it works

Once you sign up for an account, BackType scans the blogosphere looking for your URL in comment forms and attributes the comment to you by placing it on your profile page.

In a nutshell, BackType:

• Provides a unique URL that you can use if you don't have your own Web site
• Aggregates all of the comments you leave across the Web
• Aggregates comments written or shared by the people you're following
• Lets you search for comments on specific topics and follow those written by the people you care about
• Offers keyword specific search so you can easily find comments that mention your industry, products, services, competitors
• Provides an alert service that tracks keywords in comments and e-mails them to you (much like Google Alerts, but for comments)
• Allows you to track comments by blog post via Subscriptions
• Has created two widgets; one displays your own comments, the other shared comments
• Is available on FriendFeed
• Supports Digg, Reddit, Intense Debate, Live Journal and Vox comments

Potential problems

Potential problems could arise if people use your name to comment, but BackType has planned for that by offering a moderation option.

While it doesn't compete directly with JS-Kit, SezWho, and Disqus as it isn't a plugin, it could be considered a competitor to Artiklz which is also focused on aggregating comments.

So if you're a blogger or just interested in being informed about conversations in the blogosphere, why not give it a shot?

07: Cautious Optimism and Cynical Buzz (also published on ZDNet)
07: Discussion: Prosumer Media Mena Trott, Mark Fletcher, Rich Skrenta
07: Conversation: Sergey Brin of Google
07: Search engine stats: Jim Lanzone from Ask.com
07: Zimbra UI Minute
07: 3D Web Services
07: The Alumni Report Joe Kraus , Kim Polese
07: Google RSS Reader announced at Web 2.0
06: A Conversation with AOL CEO Jonathan Miller
06: Discussion: Open vs. Closed Models
06: Bubble or Bubble-let?
06: Mary Meeker talk
06: Yahoo CEO Terry Semel conversation
06: ZDNet post on the Terry Semel conversation
06: Flurry of Web 2.0 Business Activity
05: Web 2.0 Conference, first day impressions - ZDNet
05: Web 2.0 Conference coverage notes - Wed afternoon
05: Barry Diller conversation
05: Web 2.0 Conference Introduction
05: Web 2.0 Conference: Yahoo - What's New in the Search Ecosystem: Users, Publishers, and Advertisers
05: Web 2.0 Conference: Ad Models: A New Approach to Marketing?

Plus I took paper notes for the following, which I will turn into blog posts at some point:

05: Open Source Infrastructure workshop
05: Mash-ups 2.0: Where's the Business Model? workshop