Twitter just agreed to buy its long-time partner Gnip, a data company that anaylizes and sells Twitter data to a host of third parties companies. Gnip is the largest provider of social data in the world. In its announcement, Twitter’s VP of Global Business Development and Platform Jana Messerschmidt writes: Public Tweets can reveal a […]
When most people hear that Facebook upgrades are on the way, they’re probably not hoping for more tracking software. But according to a new Wall Street Journal report, that’s exactly what they’re going to get.
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Originally limited to advertisers upon launching in 2011, Twitter Analytics has finally opened its stat-tracking doors to all users. Although without a formal announcement, there’s always the possibility that it’s all a glitch—in which case, get it while it’s hot/broken.
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If you’re attending Google I/O this week, you will be a part of an experiment from the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team. On its blog today, the team outlined its plan to gather a bunch of environmental information happening around you as you meander around the Moscone Center.
In the blog post, Michael Manoochehri, Developer Programs Engineer, outlines his team’s plan to place hundreds of Arduino-based environmental sensors around the conference space to track things like temperature, noise levels, humidity and air quality in real-time. This was spawned due to a fascination with wanting to know which areas of the conference were the most popular, so it will be interesting to see what the information the team gathers actually tells us.
At first glance, this seems a little bit creepy, but it’s no different than a venue adjusting the cooling system based on the temperature inside at any given moment. As with anything that Google does, this could have implications for tracking indoor events or businesses in the future, as Manoochehri shared:
Networked sensor technology is in the early stages of revolutionizing business logistics, city planning, and consumer products. We are looking forward to sharing the Data Sensing Lab with Google I/O attendees, because we want to show how using open hardware together with the Google Cloud Platform can make this technology accessible to anyone.
Notice the wrap-up of wanting to show people how open hardware combined with Google’s Cloud Platform benefits everyone. Ok, sure. What could data like this mean for businesses, though? Well, a clothing store would be able to track how many people came in and browsed, which areas of the store were hot-spots for interest and then figure out how their displays converted. It’s like real-world ad-tracking. It makes sense, but still seems a long way off.
What will be interesting is not each dataset that is collected, but what all of them tied together tell us about our surroundings:
Our motes will be able to detect fluctuations in noise level, and some will be attached to footstep counters, to understand collective movement around the conference floor.
Of course, none of this information is personally identifiable, but the thought of our collective steps, movements and other ambient output being turned into something usable by Google is intriguing to say the least…and yes, kind of creepy.
If this particular team can share all of the data it collects in an easy to digest way, then businesses will be clamoring to toss sensors all over their stores and drop the data on whatever cloud platform that will host it the cheapest. Google would like to be that platform.
During the event, the team will hold a workshop on what it calls the “Data Sensing Lab,” so if you’re interested on learning more about what the team is gathering as you walk around, this would be the place to go. You’ll also be able to see some of the real-time visualizations on screens set up throughout the conference floor.
We’ll be covering all of the action as we’re being covered by Google.
A quick tweet can blast through Twitter like wildfire. All it takes is a click of a button and anyone can help push that 140 character shout just a little further through cyberspace, until everybody knows. This is what it looks like when that happens. More »
If you’ve wanted to know just which adorable puppy picture on your website got the most pins on Pinterest, you’re in luck. The internet pinboard folks just unveiled a new web analytics tool for businesses and site owners that’ll track which content receives the most attention in terms of clicks, pins and repins, and how recently those items were selected. Verify your website with Pinterest, and you’ll be able to check out your visitors’ pinning behavior starting today. Hmm, maybe now we’ll get to see which one of our editors is the most popular.
Filed under: Internet
Via: LA Times
Source: Pinterest blog
Have you ever wanted to know if you’re the most popular amongst your group of friends? Or which of your pals lives the furthest from you? These are questions that can’t be answered by Facebook’s latest Graph Search, but they’re perfect for the stats geeks over at Wolfram Alpha. The group started mining Facebook for data last year, but have recently expanded its analytics to include a closer look at your social relationships. Namely, they’ve identified five “network roles:” social insiders, outsiders, neighbors, gateways and connectors. Insiders share the same friends while outsiders don’t, neighbors don’t have a lot of buddies outside of your network while gateways do, and connectors are those that bridge two networks together, like a college buddy who went to the same high school. Combined with location, age and other info, this data unlocks an array of potential visualizations color-coded by different categories, letting you see patterns you might not have noticed before. If you think the analysis ends there, think again; by enabling a “Historical Analytics” feature, you’ll be allowing Wolfram Alpha to continually collect your info so you can see how your Facebook profile changes over time. If you’re not creeped out by that notion, jump on over to the rightmost source link and fill in the appropriate details to see just how well you know your “friends.”
Note: It seems that Facebook has limited Wolfram’s API calls, so you might get an error when accessing the tool for now.
Filed under: Internet
Source: Wolfram Alpha Blog, Wolfram Alpha
Many running Google+ Pages for their companies have likely been frustrated by the lack of interaction with some of their fans — if visitors haven’t already put the brand in a circle, they’ve been off-limits regardless of their interest. A quiet change may have just opened the floodgates. Pages can now share, comment on and +1 posts from those who weren’t already followers. Google hasn’t made the change official, but it is promising a feature that’s ultimately complementary: Pages should get their own analytics for demographics and social activity in the “coming weeks,” giving owners an idea as to who they’re attracting. While we hope that the loosened restrictions don’t lead to unwanted conversations in our feeds, they’re undoubtedly valuable to companies that just want to share good news or offer a helping hand.
Via: The Next Web
Assuming you were a non-naughty-lister who didn’t get the proverbial coal lump, it looks like that gift under the tree was more likely a tablet than a phone this Noël, according to Flurry. The analytics outfit said that just over half of December 25th activations were slates, and we can’t imagine too many gift-getters letting their new devices simlessly fester in a box over the big day. Overall activations more than doubled from last Christmas, and were up 332 percent on that single day from the first 20 days of December, combined. As might be expected, Apple came up big with iPad sales, but Flurry said that Amazon was also a winner with its 7-inch Kindle Fire HD tab, showing a “several thousand percent” increase over baseline activations. None of this likely comes as a huge shock to our readers, who rather overwhelmingly said that they’d rather have a Nexus 7 tablet than a pricier RAZR M as a gift if they toiled at Google.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Apple, Amazon
Source: Flurry Blog
Networking kingpin Cisco announced on Wednesday that it had acquired ThinkSmart Technologies, a company that analyzes location data by using WiFi technology. ThinkSmart’s tech reviews a network’s infrastructure by evaluating the movement of its users, traffic patterns and hours of operation. The firm then uses these analytics to help companies optimize network and staffing configurations for business operations — a long way of saying that it’s smart enough to tell a company how to better manage information flows through a network. The terms of this deal have yet to be released, but Cisco seems to think this was a smart pick up.
Filed under: Wireless, Networking
Cisco acquires WiFi data firm ThinkSmart Technologies originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 17:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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