PostRank

Analytics need to evolve. The web is a lot bigger, more complex, and more interactive these days, and yet we’re still using dot-com tools to measure and make sense of it. It’s time to do feed analytics right.

Audience engagement is no longer just about subscribers or trackbacks. You want to know what your audience is saying and doing with your content, and where. You want to be able to converse with them while their questions and comments are fresh. And you want to know who the real topic experts are in any niche — including you — not just who’s on the A-list this week.

You’ve asked us for solutions to issues of inconsistent data, unresponsive service, and simply being unable to find out about your audience. You want real-time stats that include social media engagement metrics. Community-driven influence measurement. And that’s just the beginning.

We want your input. Head over to our Feed Analytics Beta page, sign up for our beta, and let us know what you want to know. Sources to track, ways to present data, trending — we bet you have a million great ideas. And we want to incorporate the best ones into the products you’ve asked us to build.

Sure, we wish we had something to roll out right now, and we’re working on it, but the requests started flooding in sooner than we expected. It’ll take some time to get it right. But when we’re ready to show the world, you’ll get the first look and chance to test things out.

Share your input with us, sign up for our beta, and keep checking in over the next few months as we roll out the products you’ve asked for. (We recommend subscribing to the RSS feed.)

We can’t wait!

Just before the holidays here at the Aideplex, we bid adieu to our co-ops Stephen and Trevor. However, we haven’t let their chairs grow cold, as yesterday we welcomed Josh and Thomas into the fold!

Thomas is no stranger to our ranks, as this is his second co-op term with the company. In fact, after we made him help us move, he got to enjoy the new office for one whole day last term before returning to school.

Josh, however, is brand spanking new (and full-time, not a co-op). To us, at least. Like Dan Sinclair, we imported him from Toronto, though he seems to be settling in to the area nicely. (We’ve explained where to get good coffee.)

You can read a bit more about our n00bs on our About page.

Please join us in welcoming Josh and Thomas to AideRSS. We’re looking forward to having them around, and expect great and geeky things to come!

The devs did a passel o’ work recently on our PostRank extensions for Google Reader and Firefox.

The coolest improvement is that Google Reader with the PostRank extension installed should be way faster now. (In the past it would get progressively slower on big lists.)

Additionally, we’ve fixed the issue where folks with the extensions installed weren’t receiving notifications that there were updates available. Once you update the extension, you should receive notifications the same as for other extensions and plugins.

There was also a weird little bug where on rare occasions the “PostRank fetch failed” message pop-up would get stuck and basically lock up the Firefox browser. We’re pretty sure we’ve licked that one, but it’s so rare we’re having trouble reproducing it. (So if it happens to you still after you’ve upgraded the extension, please let us know.)

Once again, PostRank helps find out!

And so the voting is now open for the gents: Vote: Who Is Canada’s Most Influential Man In Social Media?

We’re proud to note that Ilya is included among the illustrious nominees.

Admittedly, going on vacation while on the verge of a beta release isn’t ideal timing. We tried to get it out the door before that, but hey, sometimes circumstances just conspire like the wind against you…

So I wasn’t sure if I’d come back to vast heaps of feedback and bugs, or to tumbleweeds tumbling and crickets chirping. (Did you know I saw actual tumbleweeds at an abandoned ranch homestead in the south Okanagan? Awesome.)

Both of those possible scenarios bring challenges, though, really, given the choice I’d take the embarrassment of data riches. And you have provided them to me!

Ilya has gotten me up to speed on issues and suggestions submitted to date, and it’s fabulous stuff. The collective community really is deliciously smart. He also did a pretty decent Melle impersonation keeping invitations going out, bug fixes processing, and feature requests recorded.

Fortunately for my job security, he seemed pretty eager to get back to his real day job.

We’ve made a few other decisions recently that I think will make our site, and our company presence in general online, even better. It is a bit more work for our designer and developers. Fortunately, we make them prove they have superhero abilities before we hire them.

In any case, keep the bug reports, suggestions, and questions coming. The result will be a site that hopefully fulfills your wildest information management dreams. Or, y’know, just helps you kick ass better at your day job. Which is pretty important, too.

And we are still welcoming those who’d like to be beta testers. Just drop me an email at melanie@aiderss.com. As always, there’s a snazzy t-shirt in it for you…