In Socialping’s v1 beta, the API was an after thought, and because of it, there were a lot of features that you could do in the web interface, but you couldn’t in the API.  This was somewhat OK, but only because our iPhone app was the only thing that actually used the API.  And even that wasn’t being used by many since it hasn’t been released in the app store yet.  There has been a lot of talk recently about API’s and that they are good for business – I’m hoping that with the new focus on the API, we can prove that to ourselves.

Oh, and that dog food part? Socialping’s new site is going to be using the API for everything, and if we can’t do something we need to do in the API, we’ll add it.

It’s been a long weekend since we started working on the new Socialping, but we can already create new accounts and users, add watchlist items, tags/groups and more, all via our new API.

We’ve gotten a few suggestions already from our users on things that they’d like to see in the new Socialping, but we can always use more.  What would you like to see in the new Socialping? What notification methods would you like to have access to? Let us know in the comments below.

Oh, and if you haven’t already, sign up for our new beta program to have access to Socialping as soon as it’s ready.

Even though Socialping is still in private beta – and beta programs are called beta specifically because unforeseen things can and do happen – we never treated Socialping like it was a beta program, we always tried to act as if our users were paying us. That is why it saddens me so much to have to break this news to you guys.

All is not lost though, even though the account data is (tweets are OK, even though they are pointless now without account data to associate with), we’ve learned so much about what we do, and because what has happened, we have the unique ability to start fresh.  We’ve been planning on pivoting Socialping for a while now, due to the recent survey that we had all of our users complete.  That survey told us lots of things, but most importantly, what exactly our users wanted out of Socialping.

Starting immediately, we are going to rebuild Socialping, keeping the parts that matter and canning the rest. We are laser focused on our notification capabilities and reporting, since combined 80% of you said that those two things were the main features that you guys use Socialping for. And don’t worry if you like to export your tweets our use our LiveConference feature, those aren’t going anywhere either.

Socialping Beta v2 will be out soon.  We hope to see you join the new beta program. Just like before, it’s going to be first come, first served, so get in asap.

If you have any questions or comments, please post them below in the comments.

AND Support
We’ve long mentioned using “AND” in between keywords to make words match in tweets and in emails to our users, but I don’t think it’s ever been formally written anywhere that you can do this. So some of the below information may already be known to you, if so, please consider it a refresher.

Before I go any further, I’d first like to explain how watchlist items work by default. By default watchlist items are phrases, meaning if your watching for “new car” we’re only going to match tweets that have “new car” somewhere in it. Unfortunately, that means that a tweet that said “I got a car, and it’s new” wouldn’t match (sorry about the bad example!). So, back to where I started, to get around this, we introduced AND support a while back, and that would let you watch for “new AND car” and you’d get the tweet that had my bad example of a tweets text in it. It doesn’t matter what order the terms are in either.

Need to use “and” in your phrase? Use +AND. For example:

Garfield +and Friends

Partial Matches
Recently we’ve been letting in people into our beta program left and right, and since it’s a beta program and we’re trying to figure out how people are actually using Socialping, we’ve been spying on the terms they use. Because of this, and with the increasingly large number of users, we noticed a trend forming: people want to be able to match things that change… the most comon of these, are URLs, like 4sq.com and bit.ly where the beginning is the same, but the ending changes.

Our matching system prior to today doesn’t allow for partial matches, this is for multiple reasons, but the most prevalent is that it almost always doesn’t give people the results they want when we supported it. Yes, when we originally launched, we did support partial matches, but after seeing a number of the very early users struggle with it, we opted to remove it.

So, now that we’ve added it back, sort of, how exactly does partial matching work? Using our short URL example above, 4sq.com (Foursquare), say you wanted to get every tweet that mentioned “mayor” and had a 4sq.com URL, you would add this as your watchlist item:

mayor AND http://4sq.com/*

What if Foursquare ever got more complex, and decided to use sub-domains? No problem, just use this:

mayor AND http://*.4sq.com/*

There are some caveats to partial matching…

• first, in order to use partial matching, you must use at least one keyword and an AND (in the example above, were using “mayor”.
• second, the items must be in order in the partial match section, for example, the above wouldn’t match .4sq.com/12345http:// but it will match http://4sq.com/12345.
• The partial match section should only contain what you want to match, so don’t use a space and then keep going, instead us an AND after it and keep going.

Between these two features we’re pretty sure you can match anything in a tweet. But if you’re still unable to find a way to match something, let us know, maybe it’ll be our next feature announcement.

Got any comments or suggestions to this feature, let us know in the comments below, or on our Get Satisfaction site.

Part of this whole “beta” thing that we are in is to see what our limits are, when things are going to break, and how they break when they do. We’ve got more data on what was and wasn’t working, and how it was working (when it did) than we could have hoped for – and the sum of that data? We couldn’t scale to where we want to go with our current setup.

Recently we’ve had to make a lot of changes to our systems to handle the load. Those changes included rolling out Redis (a NoSQL key/value store and (sort of) database) and migrating from MySQL where it made sense. Other than one subsystem that gets used in our reporting systems, we’ve pretty much completed this migration and our load has been reduced considerably.

Sorry, I’m about to get all geeky, but if you have the time, take a look at Redis’ new “hash” types, they are perfect for some of the stuff we do. We also quite heavily use the Sorted Sets (zsets) and the regular Set types. I want to commend Salvatore Sanfilippo (@antirez) for all of his hard work on Redis, it’s truly one of the best key/value databases available.

So, back to the point of this post, lately we’ve been forced to scale, scale, scale and now that we’ve done enough to give us some headroom, we’ve put together a plan that’ll hopefully let us scale to the point that we can open things up the rest of the beta users that are still waiting to get in and eventually to the public as a whole.

If you care what those changes will be: we’re planning on continuing to use Redis for the long term, both as a cache and as data store, but also adding a cluster of servers that will use Cassandra for storing our tweets and while we’re still evaluating search options (spoiler alert!), likely ElasticSearch will be used to allow you guys to better search through your tweets. We’ll still use MySQL for managing some of the account stuff, like your watchlist. I know I am glossing over a lot of details, but this is the main stack we intend on using. As more details finalize and we start rolling these out, expect updates on how it’s going.

Thank you to all of the beta testers in there breaking things, and thank you for your patience as we work through our growing pains. For those of you still waiting to get in, we’re trying our best to get you in as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience as well.

P.S. Oh, and Salvatore, if you read this, when Redis Cluster is ready for testing, we want to be part of it. We are definitely going to need it.

Enabling SMS Notifications

Instead of writing all the steps down, here’s a nifty video that walks you through the process in just a bit over a minute.

Using SMS with Socialping

SMS isn’t just a way to get notifications when tweets match your watchlist items, it’s also a way to reply and interact with the people and tweets that you’ve received.

Sending New Tweets – Sending a new tweet is easy, just send a text message to our number and start it with “new:”, for example, if I wanted to tweet “Hello World” I would send an SMS like this “new:Hello World”, and when I did, a few moments later I’d get a confirmation SMS message stating that it was posted to Twitter.

If you’ve got access to multiple accounts, make sure you login and go to your profile page by clicking on your name in the top right corner of any page and then select the default account you want the tweets to come out of.

Replying to a Tweet Notification – If you get a tweet via SMS and you want to reply to it, you can! To reply to a tweet, just do “re:@username this is my response”, and they’ll get a response instantly, including all metadata, like what tweet it’s in reply to.  To make things easier, if you are in charge of multiple brands and therefore have access to multiple companies, you don’t have to change anything, we’ll automatically figure out which account it’s meant to come from.

What’s next?

We have a few ideas for how we can make SMS even better, but before we implement any of them, we’d like to know exactly what feature’s you guys need.  Feel free to post a comment below, or post it to our support and suggestion site.

Happy Pinging.

We’ve been bunkered down, adding the features you’ve requested, and additional stability that we need to continue growing at the pace that we are in the beta program, so we haven’t done a blog post in a while, but today that changes – we’re a Microsoft Bizspark startup of the day!

A while back, in one of our conversations with their team, they asked me a number of questions, which you can read here in their interview.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank the Microsoft Bizspark team for selecting us, working with us and just plain offering a really awesome program, so thank you!  I also want to take this opportunity to thank everyone the Socialping team for all their hard work. Thanks Pingers!

Dennys Grand Slam Super Bowl Offer

This is actually a pretty interesting curve.  Of all the companies and advertisers that we’ve been monitoring for the Super Bowl, Denny’s is the only one to get a secondary spike because of their commercial.  They are also the only one to be giving away something for free, which always garners attention on Twitter.

Their peak on Grand Slam Day was during the 10:00am PST hour, but they did get a lot of tweets about them the whole day.  On Super Bowl Sunday, they received a total of 10,126 tweets.  On Grand Slam Day (Tuesday), they received 33,222 Tweets.

Socialping does a lot more on the reporting side than just tracking the number of mentions, but one of the other things we also track who did those mentions.  So on Grand Slam Day, who talked about Denny’s the most? Here you go:

1. @LAschmaps (17 Tweets sent)
2. @JaiTaTee (12 Tweets sent)
3. @Loves_basketbal (8 Tweets sent)
4. @JoeWhatDoUKnow (8 Tweets sent)
5. @HoustonSchmaps (6 Tweets sent)
6. @breakfasteater (6 Tweets sent)
7. @mochabrown305 (6 Tweets sent)
8. @TheBAbyAintMiNE (6 Tweets sent)
9. @BrittanysChoice (6 Tweets sent)
10. @jamakenboi1 (6 Tweets sent)

And of course, who talked about Denny’s that has the most followers?

1. @ChrisPirillo (76,923 followers)
2. @ThomScott (26,818 followers)
3. @DavidsMind (25,237 followers)
4. @DietBlogTalk (24,097 followers)
5. @VernonDavis85 (20,855 followers)
6. @seriouseats (19,990 followers)
7. @delwilliams (17,199 followers)
8. @2tammytodd (16,097 followers)
9. @Beauty_n_Health (15,104 followers)
10. @mattliptak (14,755 followers)

Both of the above lists are for original tweets only. For retweets, here are the top 3 users based on number of retweets and the number of followers:

Number of Retweets:

1. @LAschmaps (40 retweets)
2. @SanFranSchmaps (39 retweets)
3. @breakfast_bot (19 retweets)

Number of Followers:

1. @mayhemstudios (42,014 followers)
2. @24k (37,467 followers)
3. @ihospitality (22,966 followers)

So, did Denny’s hit a Grand Slam?  I think so, and according to their CEO, Nelson Marchioli, they hit over 2 million of them from 6am to 2pm. Congrats to Denny’s for a well executed commercial, and offer.

What do you think, did they hit a Grand Slam?  Let us know in the comments.

Since we are still monitoring Google on Twitter from their Super Bowl Ad, I became curious on how many tweets they got for today’s launch – and I’ll be honest, I was pretty surprised.

As you can see from the chart below, Google is actually getting more tweets talking about them for their Google Buzz product launch than they got for the reported $5 million USD that they spent on the Super Bowl Ad.

Google Buzz Launch vs Super Bowl Ad

So that makes you wonder, if Google can launch a product and get more buzz than the Super Bowl can provide, why’d they even run the ad?  I mean, doesn’t everyone already use Google for most things?  Food for thought.

What do you think of Google Buzz?  Is it the Twitter or Facebook killer?  What about Google Wave?  And, should Google have even run that ad in the Super Bowl, or was it a waste of $5 Million? Let us know in the comments.

While we did learn a lot about how Socialping handles itself during a high load, we also learned a lot about what you, the viewers of the Super Bowl, thought about the advertisers. In this blog post, I’d like to share some of those findings.

There are many ways to summarize the “winners”, like using sentiment analysis, determining long term winners, and quite a few other ways, but for this analysis we’re going to be basing the rankings on the peak spike during the Super Bowl. After all, the sole purpose of a massive spend like what these companies have done with the Super Bowl is simply to get people talking about your brand.

The Winners

It’s hard to name a clear winner as far as the number of people that mentioned their brand after their ads were aired, but the top 3, based on the tweet spikes after airing were Budweiser, Google and Doritos, in that order.

Budweiser

Budweiser had numerous ads that helped it to gain the number one spot, but here is the ad that appears to have caused the most tweets:

[EDIT] Well, that lasted long… apparently Budweiser doesn’t want people to watch their ads. They pulled it from YouTube – no wonder they do so crappy on Twitter, I don’t think they’ve realized the benefits of social media if they are still pulling stunts like this.

Budweiser gets very little love on twitter normally, prior to the Super Bowl Budweiser got, on average, 182 tweets per hour, yup, just 182. However, the hour that they ran their most popular ad, they got 19,134 tweets.  Now, a day later, they are averaging 258 Tweets per hour.

Super Bowl XLIV - Budweiser Tweet Volume

Google

Google went much more sentimental, and it appears to have worked quite well for them. This is the first time Google has ever advertised in the Super Bowl and I’m pretty sure they’ll be back after this response.

Prior to the Super Bowl ad, on average Google was mentioned 1,753 times per hour. The hour that Google’s ad ran, they were mentioned 15,693 times.

Super Bowl XLIV - Google Tweet Volume

As you can see from the below screenshot, one of the charts Socialping makes available is a “Tweet Distribution” chart which shows the tweets for multiple days over a single 24 hour period – Google’s mentions after the second day are still up on Twitter.

Super Bowl XLIV - Google Tweet Distribution

Doritos

Doritos had a double whammy that they pulled; the most popular of the two was actually the second ad they ran during the Super Bowl and is below:

Here is Doritos first commercial, which was only outdone by about 1,500 tweets. It is certainly possible that some of the second ad got a residual bump by people talking about the first ad:

Doritos has a very similar pattern to Budweiser, almost no mentions on Twitter and then an explosion of mentions when their ads ran. They were different than most of the other Super Bowl advertisers though, they practically created a blanket of ads throughout the entire Super Bowl time slot, which explains the multiple bumps in mentions that you see.

Super Bowl XLIV - Doritos Tweet Volume

Unfortunately they not only mimicked Budweiser before the Super Bowl, they appear to be continuing it after the Super Bowl – they dropped to an average of just 258 Tweets per hour, which is exactly the same number of tweets per hour that mention Budweiser – odd.

Super Bowl XLIV - Dorito's Tweet Distribution

The Others

Despite various other good ads, like the ones from Snickers (spiked at 3,660), Go Daddy (two ads/spikes: 3,333 and 2,104), Vizio (spiked at 3,116), Boost Mobile (spiked at 2,243) and Denny’s (2,972 and 4,407) none of them were even close to the top 3 in terms of brand mentions, except for Bud Light.  Bud Light was actually only about 2,400 tweets away from grabbing the number 3 spot.

Super Bowl XLIV - Bud Light Tweet Volume

Denny’s does look like it’s going to have a secondary effect.  They are giving away an Original Grand Slam on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010. If you look at the chart below, mentions of them are already starting to swell. We’ll be providing another post after the event that details this a bit more.

Super Bowl XLIV - Denny's Tweet Volume

Category Winners (in place order):

Alcohol

1. Budweiser
2. Bud Light
3. Michelob Ultra
4. Budweiser Select

(Yes, they are all from the same parent company Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser easily won this one).

Vehicles

1. Honda
2. Audi
3. Volkswagen of America
4. Dodge
5. Kia
6. Hyundai

Movies

1. The Last Airbender (Paramount Pictures)
2. Alice and Wonderland (Walt Disney Pictures)
3. Robin Hood (Universal Pictures)
4. The Wolfman (Universal Pictures)
5. Prince of Persia (Walt Disney Pictures)
6. Shutter Island (Paramount Pictures)

Interested to see another category?  Just let us know in the comments.

And last, but not least….

The Losers

1. Budweiser Select
2. Pop-Secret
3. Teleflora
4. Michelob Ultra
5. TRUTV

So that’s our Superbowl analysis. Rest assured, we’ll be watching the Twittersphere during all major (and even some minor) events and be posting the results here. Pretty cool, huh?

Socialping is a small startup, just 4 guys, all working remotely, all working on something we love.  So yes, we’re not a big company, heck we’re not even funded, but what we do have is a team that is well experienced in the various requirements to build an awesome, rock-solid and stable Twitter monitoring service that is screaming fast, intuitive to use and flexible enough to want to use.

We plan on having a bit of fun with this blog. We’re going to write about things we’re working on now, things that will be coming soon, the random things in our heads, and occasionally throwing in detailed analysis’ of things we’ve been monitoring.

Everyone in the company is going to be involved (see the “pinger’s” on the right for who we are), and we’re all going to be writing in our own style and about the things that matter to us.  No filter’s and no approval’s – just the raw us.

So, sit back, enjoy the ride, and maybe, just maybe if you’re up to it, leave us some comments on our posts so we know we’re loved.