I am flattered to have been invited by Sean Power and Alistair Croll to participate in a panel during their Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York this Monday (February 16). I honestly don’t know what I’m going to talk about, but the other folks on the panel (Jascha Kaykas-Wolff of WebTrends, Jennifer Zeszut of Scout Labs, and Lenny Rachitsky of Webmetrics) are really impressive .
It looks like the bootcamp is sold out, so I’ll see you there if you’ve already booked. Otherwise, feel free to get in touch if you’d like to meet up at the show or in the city: I’m @jhstrauss on Twitter or jonathan [at] thesnowballfactory.com.
As part of Facebook’s button release, they also announced a new API for pulling the share data directly from them. They were kind enough to give us a preview of this API, and we actually launched a new version of our button using the combined Facebook and awe.sm share data over the weekend. Here’s what’s new:
Uses combined share data from Facebook and awe.sm for the most complete stats
Cleaner look and slightly taller (9px) large button (it is now 53px wide by 69px tall)
Ability to customize the background and text colors of the badge in the large button
When there are no shares, the badge in the large button is clickable as a sharing interface
We also upgraded our WordPress Plugin to accommodate these changes and include some user requests:
Support color customization in plugin
Added the ability to disable the button from appearing on Pages (vs Posts)
Improved plugin performance by eliminating javascript
At this point, our version of the button is primarily targeted at existing awe.sm publishers. But, there are a few reasons other folks might want to use it over the Facebook version:
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.
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.
First of all, thanks so much to everyone who has expressed interest in joining the awe.sm private beta, especially those of you who have taken the time to complete our survey. We’ve frankly been overwhelmed by the response and sincerely apologize to anyone we haven’t been able to contact yet.
Unfortunately, we’re going to have to continue to limit access to the beta for the foreseeable future. We’re a small team with a new product and our primary focus continues to be on delivering the best possible experience to our existing users. We currently communicate very closely with all of our customers to understand their needs and how we can improve the product to best serve them. Obviously this is quite a labor-intensive process, but we firmly believe it is the quickest route to delivering a great product to everyone else.
We truly appreciate your patience and are seriously bummed not to be able to give more folks access yet. If you’ve already filled out the survey, there’s no need to do so again. And if you want to discuss anything with us, drop a line to support[at]awe.sm (though please allow a couple days for a response). Please note if you’re a developer interested in exploring our APIs, we’re being a bit more liberal about granting access to http://developers.awe.sm so go ahead and apply.
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.
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 announcedTwittefeed 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.
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
I just finished reading Clay Shirky’s *phenomenal* (if comprehensive — i.e. long) post on the future of newspapers journalism that everyone was talking about at SXSW a couple weeks ago. Anyone interested in journalism as a social utility (which should be everyone IMHO) should make the time to read this piece in full.
But the reason I’m writing about it here is to highlight how many of the lessons Shirky has drawn from the plight of the newspaper industry in the Internet age can be equally applied to the entertainment industry (i.e. studios, labels, networks, and publishers). Here is my Readers’ Digest version of Shirky’s post with notes added to emphasize the analogies to the entertainment industry:
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several…As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios…In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow…People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.)…DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
This is a classic example of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma theory in which entrenched incumbents (the newspapers in this case, but equally the labels and studios) see disruptive or even revolutionary innovations coming often before anyone else but still fail to adapt. Christensen’s explanation is consistent with if a bit drier than Shirky’s above. Entrenched incumbents are organizationally predisposed to choose sustaining innovations over disruptive innovations because of the phenomenon of middle-management. Middle-management is meant to act as a filter for senior management, and their incentive structures are generally set-up to reward passing up ideas that win the approval of their superiors. And of course the ideas most likely to win approval from senior management are those most similar to ideas that have been approved in the past. So, the system is inherently set-up to promote sustaining innovations and filter out disruptive ones — or as Shirky puts it, create “Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.”
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
In his original Long Tail article for Wired (4.5 years ago!!!), Chris Anderson declared an end to the “tyranny of physical space.” What that meant was the Internet fundamentally undermines any business model based on technologically inferior distribution. As content has no inherent physical requirements for consumption (and thus distribution), any model reliant on that is technologically inferior and thus ripe for disruption. The effect of this disruption is to eliminate the market inefficiencies and redistribute any value that was artificially aggregated by exploiting them. In other words, the margins that the content distribution gatekeepers were able to extract from the old system do not exist in the new system without gatekeepers.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points [my emphasis]…[T]here is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
We don’t really want movies or tv shows or CDs either, what we want is entertainment. By moving us beyond the “tyranny of physical space” the Internet is also freeing entertainment from the packaged goods business model that is required for physical distribution and opening up the possibility of real models for entertainment-as-a-service. And just because there isn’t an immediately clear answer to what the successful new models will look like doesn’t mean they won’t come in time or that they haven’t already.
I’ve been a bit behind on blogging the last couple weeks. Thanks again to everyone for your great comments on my Entertainment as a Service post. And for those interested, there’s a follow-up post about what I think this will mean for conventional media companies over on my personal blog.
The main reason I’ve been slacking on the blogging is because we’re getting very close to the private beta of the Snowball Factory’s first product, appropriately called awe.sm. And the reason I won’t be telling you more about awe.sm this week is because I’m at SXSW courtesy of my friend and the Snowball Factory’s first ever customer, Happyjoel — who of course *won* his trip here in a contest.
To celebrate the launch of awe.sm alpha customer Famery, the Snowball Factory is sponsoring a SXSW after-hours party tomorrow night at a top secret location.
And here are some photos to show you just how fun we are to party with:
P.S. In reality, this is more just me and my friends being bummed about the lack of places to party late-night in Austin coupled with the fact that Joel has a really big hotel room. So, we decided to buy a bunch of booze and invite people to party with us after the bars close. And being the scrappy entrepreneur that I am, I decided to see if we could turn it into a little publicity stunt for our new product. It’s still gonna rawk though, and you totally want to come!
bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York this Monday (February 16). I honestly don’t know what I’m going to talk about, but the other folks on the panel (Jascha Kaykas-Wolff of WebTrends, Jennifer Zeszut of Scout Labs, and Lenny Rachitsky of Webmetrics) are really impressive 
.
), for sharing on Facebook.
