Today, the analytics feature has been enhanced to provide even more data than before, this time with a specific focus on Facebook shares. Also new today is the integration of Tweetmeme and Digg data into shares as well as YouTube stats for video shares. For anyone using Facebook to promote their content, Sharein has just made itself indispensable.

Better Analytics for Facebook Shares

Today, in addition to seeing the views, reach, and re-shares for links shared on Twitter and Facebook, Sharein is now capturing data on Facebook "likes" and comments. In fact, it's even pulling in the comments' text itself so you can use the service as a one-stop shop for tracking the popularity of items on Facebook.

And as before, the aggregate data tracked using the service is further analyzed on your main "Shares" page where you can see the most popular links for the past week, month, or year. You'll also be able to tell who your most popular sharers are so you can better engage with your core fans or customers.

New Features Help Increase Click-Throughs on Facebook

The way your shared links appear on Facebook has also been revamped as of today. Sharein is (at last!) generating a thumbnail to accompany an article, just like how Facebook's own tool displays native link shares. The shares now also feature data on the number of tweets courtesy of Tweetmeme and the number of diggs on the social news website Digg.com. This extra information can help generate more interest in the shared link as visitors will be able to see at a glance how popular the article is on other social networks.

For video shares, extra information has been added here, too. When sharing YouTube videos, the ratings info and total views are now displayed. Again, this is to help increase click-throughs by highlighting the popularity of the content.

Try it Now!

With all the features being offered by this tool, we're surprised that more people aren't talking about or using the service. However, Sharein is still so new that few may have heard of it yet. We're sure that once Facebook and Twitter marketers, businesses, and any others who want to track their shares on social networks get wind of what Sharein can do, its popularity will increase dramatically. If you haven't tried Sharein yet, you can set up an account today from the company home page.

"...[A]bsent from the new instruction is a requirement to make raw data public," Sunlight's co-founder and Executive Director, Ellen Miller, wrote this morning. "By not including raw data at Recovery.gov, transparency is dramatically reduced. Sunlight has argued strongly for raw data in machine readable formats as the starting point for Recovery.gov. This is a significant failure by the Administration to live up to its promise for full and complete disclosure. Significant failure."

Why would the Obama Administration not offer raw bulk data as part of its much celebrated transparency? One arguement against raw data came out of the woodwork during the successful push to get the US Senate to offer mashup-friendly XML (extensible markup language) feeds for Senate voting history. "The secretary of the Senate has cited a general standing policy," John Wonderlich, policy director at Sunlight, told Politico's Victoria McGrane, "that they're not supposed to present votes in a comparative format, that senators have the right to present their votes however they want to."

The Recovery.gov website is beautifully designed, but when the data being collected from federal recovery fund recipients is made available this October it will be hard to call it transparent if presentation of that data is done entirely by the hand of the government program being scrutinized. Raw data, freely available to the public, would allow for open-ended analysis by the community at large.

Sunlight's critique of the lack of raw data forthcoming from Recovery.gov follows questions about the effectiveness of the Administration's new Data.gov site, a would-be repository for government data that anyone can extract and analyze. We called that site disappointing when it launched in May and subsequent updates to the data offerings there have been uninspiring.

Meanwhile, the UK government has taken the question of raw data so seriously that it has employed Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web and one of the world's most prominent advocates for releasing raw data to the public.

While public discussion of these kinds of moves often focuses on "making information available online" - that's old news, folks. It's an increasingly data-centric world and we need that information as open as possible for a growing corps of citizen and non-governmental analysts, computer assisted reporters and others to work their magic on. The difference between the government reporting its own data on its own websites on one hand, or opening up access to the bulk data for other people to analyze on the other hand, is like the difference between watching a puppet show and being able to shine a light behind the stage to check yourself for injustices, improprieties and other insights we can't foresee before getting a chance to look. So far the October reporting on Recovery.gov appears set to be a puppet show.

From May 19th to 20th, mediabistro will hold its Web 3.0 Conference in New York City at the New Yorker Hotel. The conference focuses on the semantic web, mashups, text and data analytics, and how they add real-world value to end users and businesses.

Keynote speakers at the conference include:

• Christine Connors, Global Director of Semantic Technology Solutions, Dow Jones;
• Aza Raskin, Head of User Experience, Mozilla Labs;
• Thomas Tague, Calais Initiative Lead, Thomson Reuters;
• Loren Grossman, Global Chief Strategy Officer, Rapp/Omnicom.

While some think of Web 3.0 as an almost science-fiction-like intelligent Web, the truth is that a lot of here-and-now technology can make your Web and corporate applications smarter and more profitable. This includes everything from extracting insights from customer behaviors to serve them better, to breaking down the corporate information silos spread throughout your company so that your business information can become actionable insights.

The next generation of the Web is about leveraging the massive amounts of information you have or intend to collect or find available on the Web to make more profitable, efficient businesses and services. This concept will be one of the major drivers of profit as we push past the "2.0" generation and seek the "what's next" of the Internet.

For more details and to register for the conference, visit www.web3event.com. ReadWriteWeb readers save 15% with the discount code XRWW. For best available rates, register by 29 April 2009.