Twitter Archive

In my past life I was responsible for creating archives of content after our consumer products went live. This was pre-Web 2.0 and was typically a painful process trying to make sure that I grabbed every product mention.

Today there are a variety of services that make it easier to archive content around a term or product. A new offering from Portland-based Iterasi launching today is hoping to do the job even better. The service is named Positive Press and is setup to capture, archive and report on any content across the Web. The core of the product is Iterasi’s archiving service which saves actual web pages from the time of the save including all contents. I spoke with CEO Pete Grillo who showed me that you can even archive full RSS feeds and the archive is of the webpages that the stories are from not just the plain RSS content.

Positive Press can also archive Twitter messages in the full Twitter style and the messages are retained for all time. It’s very simple to use – just enter a search term and any time that term is used on twitter, Positive Press will archive it. Apparently Twitter only saves 30-days of messages.
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Social client software provider Sobees is announcing the launch of their web browser-based client today. The new Sobees web client (which is in Alpha) combines Twitter and (soon) Facebook access. There is also real-time search via OneRiot, Twitter and Friendfeed.

As you can see in the graphic below, you can setup the Sobees web application with as many panels as you would like. The panels can be setup as Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts (soon) and real-time searches. For example, I could have one panel for my @centernetworks Twitter account, one for my @cloudcontacts Twitter account, a search for “web blogs that don’t link”, a search for “great web startups”, etc.

Sobees is based in Switzerland and competes with London-based Tweetdeck (which moments ago announced a new round of funding in the amount of 2 million pounds) and valley darling Seesmic. Seesmic has been talking about a browser-based version for a while now but it hasn’t launched as of yet.

The big issue with Sobees in the past was that you needed a windows machine and some runtimes to get the service to work. With this new web-based version, you need only Silverlight which works on both Windows and Mac in any browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.).

The tool also offers an anti-spam function which allows you to enter a variety of terms that will be blocked in your timeline and/or search results.

My only real suggestion for the Sobees team is to consolidate their product names – get rid of bDule and just offer Sobees Web, Sobees Lite and Sobees Full. I think it’s a bit confusing that bDule = sobees Web.

Update: Seesmic Web client is now live as well – read a very in-depth review by Frederic Lardinois at Readwriteweb.

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Content sharing and bookmarking service Shareaholic has announced the launch of the Shareaholic Buzz Monitor today. Through a new formalized partnership with OneRiot, Shareaholic users can now monitor real-time trending topics on OneRiot and Twitter.

Shareaholic is also using their own proprietary data within the real-time results. The topics cover news, videos and blogs. What’s interesting with today’s announcement is that users can also share the interesting trending topics on any of the 60+ services that Shareaholic supports which includes Digg, Facebook, Blogger, LinkedIn, ping.fm, etc.

Mozilla reports over 1 million activations and the service works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Flock, Safari and Songbird.

Earlier this week we broke the news when the official Microsoft PR Twitter account added their third tweet. Unfortunately we missed the chance to break the news that the account was now fully staffed and their first two tweets went out to the world – another reporter got that story.

Since then we’ve seen major public companies post for new employees that have a minimum of 250 followers on Twitter.

But the HUGE news this evening is that Microsoft and Linux have made love on Twitter by exchanging tweets. While there are 10,000 startups that wish they got coverage, instead a twitter message gets mad coverage.

The Microsoft/Linux tweets are nothing compared to our BREAKING NEWS that a Yankee fan and a Red Sox fan have exchanged Twitter messages. Typically this is banned – for example, as a Yankee fan, I am banned from the entire state of Massachusetts.

After 100 years of the most heated rivalry in all of sports, there just might be a new day dawning for two of the most storied teams in baseball. Will this conversation continue? Will Yankee fans eat baked beans and will Boston fans finally realize that the Yankees are the better team? I don’t know but I can assure you this…. if it happens on Twitter, we will break it!

Last night while winding down and watching Ask This Old House, I was alerted to an important post by MG Siegler (MG writes for Techcrunch). The post noted that Microsoft Corporation is now tweeting (that means they are posting up to 140 character messages on the Twitter service). This is huge news! Microsoft’s competitors like Google and Sun and Oracle and Zappos are already tweeting so it’s huge news that Redmond is now on their game too.

MG then went all Columbo on us by explaining the stats on the Microsoft official twitter account.  He notes that only 1,000 people were following the account but as of this morning it’s up to nearly 5,000! MG also found out who is behind the account. He notes, “The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people.”

The big news here is that since the post, Microsoft’s 4-person twitter communications team has added a third tweet. That’s right…a company with two tweets makes big headlines (the story got a lead from Techmeme ) so I figured I’d watch the account as best I could and I setup a SMS alert when content is added. So I present now, the third tweet message from Microsoft Corporation:

USA Today on Bing v Google “For a search that sings you may want to Bing it” ^JR

CenterNetworks will continue to monitor the account and will report back of any further important developments.

Update: Microsoft has since added tweets 4 and 5 to their account. We can confirm they are now closing in on Oprah’s count.

This afternoon Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang posted a link to a new job opening at electronics retailer Best Buy. The job title is, “Sr. Manager – Emerging Media Marketing”.  The job seems very similar to a former position I held at a Fortune 100 company.

Here’s the general overview of the position (click the link to read the full job description):

“The Emerging Media Marketing Manager is the primary lead for the Best Buy’s mobile, social, and video marketing & media efforts to drive in-store and online sales, create sustainable word of mouth evangelists, and brand loyalists. This leader will create both bolt-on social and mobile marketing initiatives and other new initiatives and identify business opportunities that can be solved wholly or in part by applying or developing social technology, digital and software strategies and technologies .”

If you are interested in a position in Minnesota, this is actually a pretty damn hot job. To be honest if this is the kind of position you would consider, but don’t care much for Minnesota, I’d still recommend considering it. Most large companies only have one of these positions and Best Buy appears to be doing some things right when it comes to online marketing.  Best Buy wants a lot of experience which is required for a position of this level.

Here’s where the job goes south for me…it’s in the “preferred qualifications” section which has two bullet points and they are:
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Last night at the Entrepreneur’s Roundtable, NY-based Voicefield founder Trevor presented his pitch about the service. I’ve posted video of his pitch below which begins with, “if I only had two words in, they would be voice twitter”. Frankly he could have stopped there and we would have known what his service does.

Trevor notes that he wants to affect the way people communicate culturally. Voicefield captures messages left via phone via voicemails. Apparently any phone, every phone is now a megaphone.

Trevor says he is very passionate about the human voice. Fred Wilson commented on the product by saying that he gets his voicemails transcribed as he prefers text. While Trevor was talking, I was thinking that if the video twitter didn’t work, could an audio twitter work?
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