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It’s great to see more designers recently embrace programming as an extension of our process rather than as an afterthought for someone else to execute. Today’s cutting edge products need to be designed by people who know what’s going on under the hood; and as curious designers it’s great to have more things to learn — it stretches the brain. But there’s something missing.
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I don’t know about you, but I’m guilty of forgetting about this. The only reason I’m not stuck in Photoshop all day is the open source community. We should be giving back to this community.

Designing Open Source Loved seeing Jon Gold’s unexpected perspective on how designers could collaborate more with open source communities. We value and respect designers (and have happily paid for design services many times!) but also think there’s a great chance for generous give-and-take with designers.

If you’re a designer who wants to make her or his first open source contribution, we promise we’ll be glad to show you how it’s done. As Jon said, this is still an issue that we’re in the early days of resolving, but we’d be eager to see designers afforded the same attention and focus in open source efforts as coders have traditionally seen.

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Are you a coder? Then you oughtta join the ThinkUp developer community this summer. In particular, our participation in Google’s Summer of Code program means that students whose proposals are accepted are eligible for $5000 in support from Google, as well as direct mentorship from our ThinkUp team.

Past participants in ThinkUp mentoring programs like Google Summer of Code have gone on to great jobs at Google, Facebook, and more. (We have to imagine it’d put you first in line for a great job at ThinkUp, too, when the time comes!) You have a FULL WEEK LEFT to get together a proposal that will rock the community’s socks off.

Speaking of our community, you should know it’s made up of 100% nice people, and we’re truly committed to bringing in women and other coders from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in software development or open source projects.

You can take a look at our general principles for Summer of Code participation below, or click through to read our entire Ideas page for Summer of Code so you can make a kickass proposal.

See you this summer!

ThinkUp Google Summer of Code 2013 Ideas Page

General Principles:

  • The most important thing to communicate in your proposal is how your work on ThinkUp will help people get more meaning and delight out of the time they spend on social networks. Of course your code matters, but if you can connect how your code will make people feel when they use ThinkUp, that’s a huge point in your favor.
  • Try to learn from other contributors – pick a minor issue that needs fixed, RUN THE TESTS and make sure they pass, and see if you can get a pull request merged into the app. We favor people who show, not tell.
  • If your proposal has to do with insights, provide example language (or visuals) that shows what a user would actually see. Got a sense of humor, or a particularly artistic or thoughtful insight? That matters as much as technical acumen.
  • We value design, good copy writing, and expressive visualizations just as much as powerful analytics and advanced algorithms, so focus on the thing that you can do uniquely well.

Farewell, 1.0: ThinkUp 2.0 Now Mainline

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.

ThinkUp in Google Summer of Code 2013!

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. 

Insights Everywhere!

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.

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My rules for Twittering are few: I tweet in basic English. I avoid abbreviations and ChatSpell. I go for complete sentences. I try to make my links worth a click. I am not above snark, no matter what I may have written in the past. I tweet my interests, including science and politics, as well as the movies. I try to keep links to stuff on my own site down to around 5 or 10%. I try to think twice before posting.
Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! - Roger Ebert’s Journal

We’re shooting for emotion, not automation

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.

New ThinkUp Beta: It’s like Graph Search, just for you.

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:

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  • 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!

Twitter changes: It’s time to upgrade, everybody!

This week, Twitter begins to shut down its older APIs. They’ve been warning about this for months, and the day is finally here.

The good news is, as Gina described the other day, the new Twitter updates make ThinkUp simpler and more efficient at a technical level, and actually remove some limitations and constraints on the kind of data the app can collect and analyze.

The only downside is that there are significant changes involved to the way ThinkUp talks to Twitter. so everybody has to upgrade ThinkUp for it to keep working with Twitter accounts.

The time to do it is now! If you’re on any recent version of ThinkUp, you can just click on “Upgrade ThinkUp” at the top of your ThinkUp dashboard and you’ll be all set. (If you have any problems, take a look at the documentation for troubleshooting ThinkUp upgrades.)

If you’re geeky, or interested in the future of where ThinkUp’s going, or just excited to try out a bunch of new features and don’t mind a few bugs, you can upgrade to the ThinkUp 2.0 beta. Here’s how to do it:

  • Existing users can simply go to Settings > Application and check “Enable beta upgrades” before clicking on “Upgrade ThinkUp” at the top of the screen to jump to the 2.0 beta. 
  • If you’re a new user, or want to upgrade to the ThinkUp 2.0 beta manually, you can download ThinkUp 2.0 beta 4 as a zip file.
  • To see what’s new in ThinkUp 1.3 and ThinkUp 2.0 beta 4, you can read the changelog. (Spoilers: The biggest fix is compliance with the new Twitter API.)

We are really hard at work on getting ThinkUp 2.0 polished and ready for everyone to try, so your bug reports and testing are critically important — thanks for helping out!

Oh, and as we hinted, following this release we’re getting ready for launching one of the biggest and best new ThinkUp features ever. Get onto one of the latest versions of ThinkUp so that you can be ready to try it out as soon as the new version is available!

Guess what cool new feature we’re working on next?