Delivering real-time social media analytics is one of the core infrastructure and technological pieces of our platform at AideRSS. We’re happy to announce that earlier this week we successfully migrated our systems to deliver exactly that: real-time monitoring of the most popular social media sites and platforms. (Press release.)
This means immediate feedback for PostRank scores as users are engaging with publishers’ content (faster and better discovery) and an immediate feedback loop for the publishers (to help them engage in new and ongoing conversations).
As part of the upgrade, we have also added a number of new sources to our platform:
Among the new additions are: Diigo, Feecle, Furl, Identica, Jaiku, BrightKite and MéxicoDiario. And of course, we are always working on adding new sites and improving our global coverage.
Real-time Authoritative Search
Over the course of past five years, online social networks, and a proliferation of socially-oriented tools such as wikis, blogs, microblogging, bookmarking and sharing sites, have transformed the Web from a technical infrastructure to a social platform, which is now often referred to as the Social Web.
Vik Singh, architect of the Yahoo! Search BOSS team, recently highlighted some of the challenges and opportunities that this change has brought forward:
One emerging area of search that I think no one has really solved is real-time authoritative search. When breaking news happens (like the Mumbai bombing, Hudson River plane crash, or wildfires), it’s difficult for traditional news sources to discover and prioritize all the information in a timely fashion. It can take several minutes or hours for traditional media to converge on the important stories. However, new social media outlets like Twitter are breaking these important stories faster than traditional media. By looking at the number of users chatting about these topics, one can measure the future newsworthiness of a very fresh story despite its potentially minimal traditional news coverage at that moment.
Later in his Q&A, Vik also highlights PostRank as a potential and promising solution to the problem he outlines. The combination of real-time social media monitoring and PostRank analysis provides a great a signal for the new and upcoming stories as they develop. Want to give it a try? Try our BOSS+PostRank mashup:
BOSS + PostRank
To get started simply type in a query (e.g. yahoo), select news, and click search. To power the search, we use the BOSS Mashup framework to retrieve the latest stories from around the web, and then apply a PostRank filter on top – stories with the highest engagement have the highest scores and are displayed first in the list. You can preview the story, click on the PostRank score to view some of the metrics behind it, and even see the filtered out stories at the bottom of the page:
The combination of BOSS and PostRank APIs is a great demonstration of leveraging the data generated in the Social Web. Give it a try (boss.postrank.com), and let us know on your thoughts and suggestions.