ThinkUp

If you’re a member of ThinkUp’s mailing list and you’re using Chrome, you now have tester access to a packaged build of the ThinkUp Notifier Chrome extension. This is an alpha Chrome extension which notifies you about new ThinkUp insights from your installation as they are generated.

Once you install it in your browser, to use it, enter your installation URL, login email address, and ThinkUp API key into Notifier’s settings, and you’ll start receiving notifications. The extension also adds a handy ThinkUp button to your Chrome toolbar, with dropdown access to your ThinkUp stream.

That looks like this:

The extension is currently an alpha build only available to ThinkUp mailing list members. It has console debug logging enabled, zero error checking, and not a whole lot of testing behind it. Brave power users: please give it a try, and submit bug reports and pull requests to the ThinkUp Notifier GitHub repository. Thanks.

One of the toughest parts of making an app, especially an open source app, is that there are always tons of good ideas that just take a lot of time and effort. So we often end up saying “Not yet” to features when we’d much rather say “Yes!”

Some great news today, with the launch of Beta 7, the newest version of ThinkUp 2.0. We’re finally saying yes to one of the most-requested features in ThinkUp’s history: Keyword and #hashtag tracking.

Just enter the keyword or hashtag you want to track on Twitter, and ThinkUp will automatically start watching for tweets which use that term, and give you insights into how much activity is happening with your word.

This new feature was spearheaded by Eduard Cucurella, a brand-new ThinkUp contributor, and sponsored by Daniel Giribet. It’s a perfect demonstration of how an open-source community’s supposed to work - a coder who’s new to our community helping deliver something that’s one of the longest-standing requests from users. Hooray!

Better Insight Notifications

Insights are the core of how we work with ThinkUp - they’re the items that make up your stream and tell you what’s going on. But not everybody is staring at ThinkUp all day (it’s okay! We forgive you!) so the new Beta of ThinkUp makes it easier than ever to get your insights:

• RSS! Yeah, it’s 2013 and ThinkUp is launching an RSS feature! If you know what RSS is, you know why this is awesome. And if you don’t know what RSS is, then you’ll be more interested in:
• Chrome and Pushover notifications! You can get your insights delivered as popup notifications right in your Chrome browser (using a small Chrome extension) or using Pushover on Android or iOS devices, which is awesome for putting a widget on your phone’s homescreen or talking to crazy devices like those Pebble watches.

Basically, ThinkUp is going where you are, and telling you much more about what you are interested in. That’s how it’s supposed to work. You can also see the other details of this release, like bug fixes, in the complete release notes. Also, since our last release of ThinkUp we cleaned up the look of our documentation, so it’s a little prettier, and maybe even a little bit easier to navigate.

Thanks so much to all of our contributors and users who made this new beta possible, and remind your friends to sign up for ThinkUp.com so they can be the first to try out the app once it’s ready for the public.

We’ve been hard at work refining and improving version 2.0 of ThinkUp, and it’s finally time for every user to move over to the beta.

As of today, ThinkUp’s 1.x release path is officially retired. All new ThinkUp releases and development will happen on 2.0. Users who are currently running a 1.x version of ThinkUp will see the “Upgrade ThinkUp” prompt when they log in. That upgrade will take them to the latest 2.0 beta.

Speaking of, we released beta 6 last week to accomodate a change Twitter made to their authorization mechanism. Any version of ThinkUp prior to 2.0 beta 6 will not be able to add new Twitter accounts. That means it’s time to upgrade! When you do, enjoy a smarter insights stream, better search, our gorgeous redesign, and more.

Great news! Today ThinkUp was accepted as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2013. GSoC is a fantastic Google-funded program that pays university students a generous $5,000 USD stipend to hack on an open source project over the summer. As one of the participating projects, we’ll assign a mentor to each student we accept to guide them through the summer and grade them on their finished project. 

In short, it’s the best summer job a college student programmer can possibly get.

If you’re a student interested in getting great firsthand experience in open source this summer, check out ThinkUp’s GSoC 2013 profile, and get ready to start submitting your applications starting April 22nd. 

It’s always exciting to see measurement-based apps moving toward streams of insights instead of just having dashboards, since that’s what we’re busy doing on ThinkUp.

Two awesome examples that just caught our eye:

Chartbeat’s Daily Perspectives:

In their own words, “[I]n addition to providing a general overview of your must-know information (traffic volumes, top stories and sections, top referrers) we wanted to uncover the more significant insights that help newsrooms really piece together what happened. The insights that contribute to a larger understanding the value of your content as it pertains to the quality of your audiences’ experiences.”

RunKeeper Insights:

In the case of both RunKeeper and Chartbeat, we thought it was awesome they’d arrived at the word “insights” to describe what these new displays offer; It took us a while to settle on that as the name for the individual items in ThinkUp’s stream, and the fact that others came up with the same term seems to indicate it’s a good word to describe the concept. (Though RunKeeper still has a fairly traditional dashboard look, they’re definitely heading toward more of an ongoing set of insights into your athletic endeavors.)

We’ll keep our eyes open for more examples of apps to learn from, but in the meantime, thanks to the Chartbeat & RunKeeper teams for the inspiration.

We try to pay attention to all the smart folks doing creative things with social networks as we build ThinkUp, and a new app called Perks got our attention the other day. It seems like an interesting app and the landing page is actually far prettier than ours, but something about the app rubbed me the wrong way and I wanted to figure out why.

First, a disclaimer: This isn’t a criticism of Perks or the team building it — we love that it’s an app that is really clear to its audience about how it works, what it costs, and what the goals are for using it; There are a lot of lessons we could learn from their example in these regards.

That being said, many of the features that the site lists are ones we’re specifically not going to include in ThinkUp, and it makes sense to articulate why. (And, to be clear, if the ThinkUp community thinks these features are useful and wants to extend the app to handle them, we’re all for that.)

• An audience is a privilege. One of the recurring themes in business-oriented tools is they describe the process of interacting with your followers or fans or friends as something between a heavy burden and an annoying obligation. They emphasize mechanical ways to “manage” or “handle” lots of people, as if people on the other end of an interaction won’t know or realize that you’re sending them the equivalent of a form letter, or worse, of junk mail. But people are smart! They know when a bot is shooting DMs at them.
• Emotion, not automation. Ultimately, what software should do is push us toward having more meaningful connections. Now, computers are great at automating rote tasks, and we should definitely use them for those functions. But if we’re able to build the app we want ThinkUp to be, we’re hoping it’s the sort of thing you read and it tells you “you bravely made yourself emotionally vulnerable, and these are the people who responded to that honesty”, not “you maximized your follower count this week”. Now granted, we’re a long way away from that goal, and much closer to the latter than the former, but we do know where we’re headed.

In these early days, as we greet lots of new users (and welcome to everybody who just signed up to our waiting list!) and set the standards for our developer community, we think it’s especially important to lay the groundwork for what we hope is years of thoughtful, heartfelt development.

We wish the best to everybody who makes apps to help users, and we know there’s lots of demand for convenience or mechanical management tools in social media. But we’re betting that, in the long run, the even bigger opportunity is in finding meaning and insights and maybe even delight in the sheer joy of connecting with another person, and there’s no reason that technology like ThinkUp can’t do that too.

Today we’re launching Beta 5 of ThinkUp 2.0, the biggest milestone in our march toward the final release of the new ThinkUp. There are a whole bunch of new features in this version that you’ll want to check out! If you haven’t ever tried ThinkUp yet, sign up for the waiting list and you can be the first in line. Here’s a look at what’s new:

• Powerful new social search: Our new ThinkUp Search kinda looks like Facebook’s new Graph Search, but it lets you search all of your data — your own tweets, your Foursquare checkins, your Facebook status updates, the bios of your Twitter followers, anything you’ve ever posted to Google+, the content from your Facebook fan pages, and more. And we’re working with the community to constantly expand what you’re able to search. Try this: Search your Twitter followers to see which ones have bios that mention having a dog, and then tweet at them to post photos! If you have a lot of Twitter followers, you’ll wonder how you were ever able to get by without being able to search for them by name.
• Smoother, sleeker installation: We’ve completely redesigned the installation helper that lets you set up your ThinkUp configuration. It matches the modern new look of ThinkUp 2.0 and offers much smarter assistance if you get stuck along the way. This carries through all the way to Twitter setup, where we’ve eliminated a click when you first configure your Twitter authorization. It’s one less place to get stuck while getting started.
• Faster insights: We’ve slimmed down the main insights stream that you see when you visit your ThinkUp, so it loads faster and works more smoothly on mobile devices. And we fixed a bug that some users ran in to on the last beta where insights took a long time to show up.
  
• An all-new ThinkUp.com: We’ve redesigned ThinkUp.com to show more of what the app is about while being less cluttered. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve launched a brand new waiting list so that non-technical users can sign up to get started with ThinkUp. We’re still hard at work on building out the service for them, but tell your friends now so they can be first in line when we launch.

In all, it’s been a phenomenal effort by the community to get us closer to the launch of the best version of ThinkUp yet. You can read a full set of changes in the documentation, but we hope you’ll try out the latest version of ThinkUp and let us know what you think!