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TweetPo.st: The Next Generation

* Update: We’ve suspended new signups on TweetPo.st until further notice. Full details here. *

I’m very happy to announce we have begun private beta testing the new version of TweetPo.st. I’ll include the full back-story below, but I personally apologize for the lack of communication on TweetPo.st the last few months and for any frustration it may have caused. We’re really excited about the new version because, in addition to being able to take on new users again, we have added support for Facebook Pages, our top requested feature.

TweetPo.st is a smarter way to update Facebook from Twitter. Here are the key features of the new version:

Post tweets as Facebook Status Updates
Post links you tweet on your Facebook Wall (so your friends can watch videos and see pictures right in their News Feed)
Ignore @replies
Change @mentions to real names
Only post the tweets you specify to Facebook (using either inclusive or exclusive filters)
Track links posted to Facebook with awe.sm
*NEW* Supports both Facebook Profiles and Pages
*NEW* Manage multiple posting configurations from Twitter accounts to Facebook Profiles or Pages

While we’re eager to get as many people using the new version of TweetPo.st as soon as possible, we need to limit the number of users until we work out all the kinks. We don’t anticipate this private beta period lasting more than a couple of weeks, but feel free to email support [at] tweetpo.st if you’d like to help us test before then. Otherwise, please follow @tweet_post to be the first to know when it’s publicly available.

The Back-Story

About 4 months ago, we started seeing bug reports from users who were encountering errors signing up for TweetPo.st. It took some investigation, but we soon figured out that, due to the way we originally built the app (i.e. not using Twitter OAuth, which wasn’t available at the time), TweetPo.st had hit Twitter’s following/follower ratio limit. Without going into too much detail, this required us to completely re-architect TweetPo.st from the ground-up using Twitter’s new Streaming API.

Originally, we thought we’d get this all done in December. But, we’re a small team working on 3 products (awe.sm, TweetPo.st, and fbShare.me). So, sometimes things don’t happen as quickly as we’d like. However, we dropped the ball on communications in this case. We didn’t want to announce a revised schedule until we had one we felt we could stick to, and new things continued to come up that kept us from finishing TweetPo.st. So, instead we went radio silent, which was not the right thing to do.

We apologize for not handling the situation as well as we should. And we hope you find the new version of TweetPo.st worth the wait when we make it publicly available in the next few weeks.

awe.sm + Tweetie 2 = Crazy Delicious!

We hear those new-fangled iPhone thingies are pretty cool and a lot of the kids today are using them for the Twitter with an app called Tweetie 2. Since the nice folks over at atebits were kind enough to add a custom URL shortening feature to Tweetie 2, we made an awe.sm API endpoint to work with it (and any other Twitter client that supports a similarly standardized URL shortening API call). Here’s how to use it.

1) In the Tweetie Settings, select Custom URL Shortener and you’ll get a screen like this:

2) Enter the following string replacing ‘{YOUR API KEY}’ with your awe.sm API Key (if you don’t have an awe.sm API Key yet, we appreciate your continued patience):
http://create.awe.sm/tweet?create_type=tweetie&api_key={YOUR API KEY}&target=%@

3) When writing your tweets, enter the Compose Menu and click the Shrink URLs button as seen here:

This will create awe.sm-powered URLs using whatever custom domain you have as your account default with the channel (share_type) ‘twitter’ and tool (create_type) ‘tweetie’.

If you’re a developer interested in integrating awe.sm support into your app, please check out our API documentation and feel free to drop us a line at developers [at] awe.sm.

The Facebook Sharecount Button

We hadn’t really planned to announce this yet, but the cat is now out of the bag.

A few weeks back I decided to build a button for my blog that would give me the same functionality of ‘retweet’ buttons, like the ones from TweetMeme and Backtype (both of which support awe.sm by the way ), for sharing on Facebook.

I built it in a weekend on top of our powerful Aggregate Data API, and then we decided some other folks might like it too. So, we put up a little splash page and started quietly asking people to test it. Mashable was the first major blog to launch it this past weekend, and were very helpful in providing feedback. You can now also find it live on The Next Web, and grab it for your own site at fbShare.me.

What it does:

Displays the number of shares and on hover the total number of clicks for those shares (displays Facebook logo when 0 shares)
Gives you a choice between a large or small button
Tracks the shares from the button using your awe.sm API Key or fbShare.me links
Allows you to add Google Analytics parameters to fbShare.me links

Please note, this is NOT an officially endorsed Facebook tool. It doesn’t have special access to secret Facebook APIs that tell you how many times a link has been shared on Facebook. The count and click numbers are only for share actions that happen via awe.sm. In addition to the shares that occur through the fbShare.me button, any that happen through other awe.sm-enabled sharing or syndication tools, like Sociable, AddToAny, and TweetPo.st, will also be counted.

We put this out there because we thought it was cool and hoped others would find it useful. It is also a great reference implementation for the kinds of valuable sharing tools that can be built on top of the awe.sm APIs. awe.sm is a social media campaign tracking platform for publishers, and we want to offer them the broadest selection of syndication and sharing tools possible. Our real value isn’t in building our own tools, it’s in helping the developers of the thousands of great tools out there offer publishers a way to connect those individual solutions together to form a cohesive system.

Our hope for fbShare.me is that it will inspire more great tools developers to incorporate awe.sm-powered functionality into what they’re building. So if you’re working on a social media syndication or sharing tool for publishers, please check out our APIs and feel free to drop us a line at developers [at] awe.sm.

Testing the new Twitter Publisher WP Plugin

WP plugin developer Timan Rebel just launched a new WP plugin called Twitter Publisher, which is a great way to automatically tweet new blog posts when they are published.

Twitter Publisher supports both bit.ly and awe.sm to shorten the links going to Twitter, and it will even add Google Analytics campaign parameters to the bit.ly links for you (awe.sm does this automatically ). But the coolest feature IMHO is the ability to give the author of the post credit in the tweet. This is great for larger blogs with multiple authors. However if you’re just rolling solo, it’s not a huge advantage over Twitterfeed (which also supports awe.sm ).

We’re gonna test it out on this blog to see how it works, but probably stick with Twitterfeed on my personal blog for now.

Update: It looks like there are still some bugs in the Twitter Publisher plugin, specifically it is ignoring the setting to use awe.sm and using bit.ly instead. We’ve alerted Timan, and hopefully he will release a fix soon.

Update 2: The plugin should be working correctly now.

Presenting awe.sm

We’ve mentioned awe.sm a couple of times on this blog, and now it’s finally time to pull back the curtain and tell you guys what it’s all about. awe.sm is an open sharing analytics platform — a way to instrument, track, and analyze how content and attention flow through the social web. Since February, we’ve been working with a select group of application developers, tools partners, and content publishers to test and refine awe.sm and help us get it ready for today: the launch of our private beta! While we’re not quite ready to take all comers, we are now officially opening up the invites beyond the group that’s been so helpful these last 3 months. If you’ve already been in contact with us, thanks for your patience and we’ll be reaching out to you directly over the next few weeks with your invite. If you want to know how to get an invite, read on…

awe.sm for Publishers
Our mission here at the Snowball Factory is to help connect creators of interesting content with the people who love it. And we believe social media provides an incredibly powerful infrastructure to do that. awe.sm is the centerpiece of our efforts to make social media a more efficient, effective, and measurable marketing channel for content publishers. awe.sm integrates with the tools you already use to make the whole of your social media self-promotion efforts (e.g. pimping your latest blog post on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc) greater than the sum of the parts by giving you a comprehensive view of the resulting traffic *right in Google Analytics*. awe.sm is currently supported in Twitterfeed, AddToAny, TweetFace (which we built too ), and our version of the Sociable WordPress Plugin. We’ve been working with TechCrunch as well as a number of smaller publishers during our alpha, and as of today we will be handing out invites to publishers who complete our survey. For more information on our publisher offering, please drop us a line to publishers [at] awe.sm.

awe.sm for Developers
In building awe.sm, we realized that sharing analytics is a pain point felt by a broader group than just publishers and we wanted to make our solution available to others building applications with sharing components. To that end, awe.sm was built from the APIs up and developers can recreate any of our features (or build new ones of their own) entirely in their own apps. We like to think of it as analytics infrastructure-as-a-service. And we’re proud to already be powering features of Zentact, Famery, SimplyBox, and KISSmetrics. We’re still limiting access to our API documentation at this point. But if you’re a developer who would like to check it out, please send a brief description of your application and how you would like to use awe.sm to developers [at] awe.sm.

awe.sm Partners
Each publisher’s approach to social media marketing is different, and we don’t believe there is (or should be) a one-size-fits-all solution. And while we will build some tools, like TweetFace, ourselves when we can’t find existing ones that do what we want, we’d much rather partner with folks who are totally focused on making a great tool to solve a particular publisher need. That’s why we’re very excited to announce awe.sm support in AddToAny, one of the most innovative share widgets out there, to go along with our previously announced Twittefeed integration. In addition to recommending partner tools to awe.sm publishers, we also plan to offer an affiliate model for partners who drive premium awe.sm signups. So if you’ve got a publisher tool that you’d like to integrate with awe.sm, please hit us up at partners [at] awe.sm.

Private-Label URL Shorteners (What you can get right now!)
One of the most notable features of awe.sm is that it can shorten long URLs, which we’ve been told is particularly useful for this thing called Twitter that everyone is talking about . It is such a notable feature that a bunch of people asked us if we could do it using domains other than http://awe.sm, which we can. In fact, we’re already powering URL shorteners for some of the above mentioned partners including TechCrunch (tcrn.ch), KISSmetrics (klck.me), Topspin (t.opsp.in), and AddToAny (a2a.me). So starting today, we’re officially offering *private-label URL shorteners running on your domain starting at just $99 per year*.

For $99/year, you get:

a hassle-free hosted solution with no set-up costs
10k shortened URLs per month and no limit on redirections
full clickstream stats and Google Analytics integration
support in all awe.sm-enabled publisher tools
99% monthly uptime money-back guarantee

We also offer advanced features like the ability to build your own stats UI as well as dedicated servers and higher SLAs. You can get started now or ping us for more info at domains [at] awe.sm.

BarCampLA 7 Presentation: ‘URLs are the new cookies’

I just finished my presentation at BarCampLA 7 called ‘URLs are the new cookies’ (name credit: Alistair Croll). I talked a little bit about awe.sm, but the point was more to discuss the problem statement awe.sm is trying to solve.

See for yourself:

And here’s a link to the PDF version. Thanks to everyone who attended for being a great crowd and having some really insightful questions.

P.S. This is my second time presenting at BarCampLA. The last time was at BarCampLA 1 in 2006

10 Smart Brands using Social Media

I just read a great post over on Mashable, that I wanted to share here:

Presenting: 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media

While this is ostensibly a post about large national/global brands, I found the underlying lessons from these examples to be potentially useful to *anyone* seeking to use social media to build brand equity. You should definitely go read the original post for the full details on each campaign, but here’s my take on the important lessons from each one:

Blendtec Blends it on YouTube – Creativity is king; advertising is just content someone is willing to pay for you to watch, it doesn’t *have* to be annoying and uninteresting
Burger King and the Sacrifice Facebook Application – People like to have fun
Starbucks Asks for Your Advice – Making your customers feel like they’re part of the process builds brand loyalty through a sense of co-ownership
Sun Microsystems and the CEO Blog – Kill them with transparency (a variation on my dad’s old adage: ‘kill them with kindness’); disarm your critics by giving them a voice and answering them back
IBM With Lots of Blogs – Content == Authority; as long as it’s quality content (and on-brand), more *is* better on the Internet — it gives you higher search engine ranking and it doesn’t hurt to be the first thing a prospective customer finds when they do research on your area of interest/expertise (what do you think this blog is all about? )
Zappos on Twitter – A company (not just a brand) can have a personality in the Internet age, and it is defined by its employees; being accessible and relatable reminds your customers that there are real people behind your brand, and that tends to make them like you more (unless those real people really suck )
Comcast on Twitter too – Empower your community manager to address customers needs; Frank from Comcast doesn’t just spew marketing platitudes into the Twittersphere, he actually helps customers in need (Corollary: if you have an unempowered community manager fronting for your brand, he/she is bound to get slaughtered and likely do more harm to brand equity than good)
Ford and Social Media PR – Bad press doesn’t go away on the Internet; it’s not like the conventional media world in which all you need to do is weather *this* news cycle — that disparaging blog post will be popping up in searches for your brand for the rest of your life and beyond, so you’d better get out there and address it
Graco Uses Pictures on Flickr – *Every* customer should be writing a testimonial; make it so easy and fun for your customers to show their brand loyalty that it’s a no-brainer for them
Dell Doing it Everywhere – Social media isn’t media; this isn’t an ad buy you make selectively based on demographics and vertical content, it’s a horizontal platform for customer engagement comprised of many different elements — you may not have the time or resources to be everywhere, but take the time to craft a campaign in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Suggest to ^?

Suggest to Techmeme Button

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, the code below will not work for you. Instead, go here to get the plugin.

Techmeme is an essential news discovery tool for me. It replaced my RSS reader and the totally unmanageable list of blog feeds that came with it years ago, and now I’d estimate that at least 95% of the news I consume is discovered via Techmeme or Twitter. For me, more than Digg or Hacker News or anything else, Techmeme is my social news source.

As such, it was big news to me when Techmeme announced this past Wednesday that they’re now accepting “tips” via Twitter. So much so that I was hoping (and even not so subtly suggesting) some of my Twitter “friends” would submit one of the blog posts I wrote since the feature was announced. But, then I realized most of my friends didn’t know they could do this — and even if they did, the syntax is irregular (why “tip @techmeme” instead of just “@techmeme”?) and the whole process is a bit complicated.

So, it occurred to me we should have a “Digg It” equivalent embeddable call-to-action for Techmeme submission. Since no one else seemed to have made one yet, I took a stab:

Suggest to ^?

As you can tell, I’m not a designer or a developer. I’m just a lowly product monkey, and this isn’t meant to be anything more than my version of a working feature spec.

That said, here’s the code:
<div class="techmeme-suggest-button"> <p style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small"> <a style="text-decoration: none" title="Suggest to Techmeme via Twitter" href="javascript:var d=document,f='http://twitter.com/home/',l=d.location,e=encodeURIComponent,p='?status=tip%20@Techmeme%20',q=e(l.href)+'%20'+e(d.title);1;try{if(!/^(.*\.)?twitter\.[^.]*$/.test(l.host))throw(0);share_internal_bookmarklet(p)}catch(z){a=function(){if(!window.open(f+p+q,'twitter'))l.href=f+p+q};if(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent))setTimeout(a,0);else{a()}}void(0)">Suggest to <sub><img src="http://thesnowballfactory.com/images/techmemechicklet_16.png" border="0" alt="" /></sub></a><a style="text-decoration: none" title="What's this?" href="http://news.techmeme.com/090128/twitter-tips" target="_blank"><sup>?</sup></a> </p> </div>

If you want to use it, just copy and paste it into the bottom of your blog posts (make sure you’re editing in HTML mode). You can change the size and font of the text by editing <p style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: small"> (for example, try font-family: serif or font-size: medium). You can also change the size of the Techmeme favicon by switching out techmemechicklet_16.png for techmemechicklet_24.png (24px) or techmemechicklet_32.png (32px).

Lord knows it’s *ugly* (both the code and the design). So, real developers and designers I invite you to please improve upon it. All I ask is for you to post a link to your better version in the comments below, so we can all use it (and I can stop using my crappy one ).

Update: This blog is hosted on WordPress.com. And I was pretty surprised when I was originally able to embed the javascript for the buttons and it didn’t get stripped out, because I thought you weren’t allowed to run any scripts on WP.com. Well, it turns out you aren’t but they just don’t check for it when you post. At some point in the last 11hrs, the javascript powering the buttons in this post got stripped out (thereby breaking them, to which Russ alerted me). To make them work again, I’ve now just hardcoded the URL’s for them. The example javascript should still work for you (as long as your blog isn’t on WP.com), and you can see the javascript version in action at the bottom of this post on my (self-hosted) personal blog.

Update 2: The post just made the front page of Techmeme thanks to a mention from Gabe and a tip from Rahmin. If that’s not meta, I don’t know what is . And, it’s super cool to get some love from Gabe — I’m a huge fan of what he and the team have done over at Techmeme.

Update 3: As my buddy Mark just figured out, even self-hosted WordPress chokes on javascript in the body of the post. The only reason I didn’t notice this on my self-hosted WP blog is because I have the (very handy) Exec-PHP plugin installed, which apparently not only executes php in your posts but also js. The elegant solution (other than you also installing Exec-PHP on your self-hosted WP blog) would be to do a php version or maybe even a WP plug-in or template tag. But, frankly I can’t be bothered . So, I might just make a bookmarklet that generates static HTML for a ‘Submit to Techmeme’ button based on whatever page you’re on, so you can copy and paste it into any post on any publishing platform that supports HTML.

Update 4: Last one, I swear! Just to say there’s now a ‘Submit to Techmeme’ button plugin for WordPress (self-hosted).

Suggest to ^?

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