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Now that Facebook allows developers to store data for more than 24 hours, social media analytics firms like Sysomos are finally able to include public updates from Facebook users in their databases. Sysomos began surfacing this data on some of its customers' accounts yesterday and plans to roll these new features out to the rest of its users soon. Sponsor Given the size of Facebook's user base, being able to analyze this data will be a major boon for anybody who is interested in tracking these kinds of updates. Sysomos already allowed its users to search and analyze Facebook fan pages and groups for the last few months through its MAP analytics tool. The company now also includes these updates in Heartbeat, Sysomos' social media monitoring tool. Sysomos' integration of the Open Graph API will surface all the activity that has been made public by a user, including status updates and public wall posts. Thanks to Sysomos' new ability to analyze and search public Facebook updates, we were, for example, able to track the backlash against Facebook's "instant personalization." According to Sysomos, only about 15% of the public updates about this topic were positive. Are Facebook Users Aware that their Updates Will Live a Second Life in Social Media Analytics Tools? Sysomos, of course, only pulls in public updates, but we have to wonder if most Facebook users are aware that their updates will end up in the vast data repositories of firms like Sysomos and Radian6. Given the current backlash against what some users perceive as an invasion of their privacy by Facebook, it will be interesting to see how Facebook users will react to this. Discuss
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Analyzing Facebook: Sysomos Adds Public Facebook Updates to Its Analytics Platform
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At the most recent Apple keynote , Steve Jobs announced Apple's upcoming advertising platform called iAd . Included as a part of the OS 4.0 update, the mobile operating system upgrade due out for iPhone this summer and iPad later this fall, the iAd system aims, in its very Apple-ly way, to make mobile advertisements "delightful," meaning ads worth clicking on, engaging with and viewing. What Jobs didn't mention, though, is how Apple plans to give iAd its head start: by kicking out the competing analytics and advertising platforms now thriving in nearly every iPhone app today. Or so it seems. Sponsor Developer Reports App Store Rejection Due to Analytics Inclusion Last week, technology news blog VentureBeat caught wind of a story where Apple had rejected an iPhone application because it, according to the email sent to the developer, "is not appropriate for applications to gather user analytics." Not appropriate, you may ask? Since when? Apparently since Apple released their updated iPhone Developer Agreement. Alongside the SDK 4 beta , made available shortly after the announcement in early April, the developer contract was updated, too. Specifically, the clause in question, section 3.3.9, reads, in part (more here ): Notwithstanding anything else in this Agreement, Device Data may not be provided or disclosed to a third party without Apple's prior written consent. Accordingly, the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited. To date, the changes detailed in this clause have been overshadowed by the one preceding it - in Section 3.3.1, Apple banned the use of cross-compiler tools for building iPhone applications, like the one Adobe was just about to ship , for example. But in the long run, it's Section 3.3.9 that may have more impact on the industry as a whole. "FEAR" You may have not heard too much about this change because no one actually knows what's going on thanks to Apple's par-for-the-course policy of refusing to clarify its meaning. Plus, the companies who may be the most heavily affected by an analytics ban - services like Flurry , MediaLets , Motally , Localytics , and SimpleGeo , to name a few - don't want to talk about it. On record that is. But after a dozen or so phone calls and emails, we're starting to see a picture forming and it can be summed up in one word: FEAR . "Nobody wants to be the canary in the coal mine," one source told us, referring to the radio silence we're getting from these companies when you would have otherwise expected to hear outcry, or perhaps even anti-competitive claims. Some companies, off-record, say they are afraid to complain . If they do, they could be the next to be banned. Another source reported that a number of their company's clients weren't submitting updates to the iTunes Application Store because they were worried that the updates, with the analytics included of course, would be rejected. Instead, the clients are leaving their older applications in place since it doesn't appear that Apple is going back through all the current apps and booting out those that already include analytics within them. "Maybe the older apps are grandfathered in?" they wondered aloud. The fact that no one knows, not even the big name, big box retailer that sits at the top of the latter's client list, is a testament to how Apple likes to do business. Here's the agreement, read it, sign it...and that's the extent of the communication. As to those who did manage to get someone from Apple to talk about it? The answer was simply: "read the agreement." But if Apple holds true to what's written there, it sounds like it could spell doom for mobile analytics and ad firms, especially the small-time players beloved by independent developers. iAd, Anti-Competitive? What no one will say - again, on record, that is - is that the changes have a whiff of anti-competitive behavior to them. The issue at hand: Apple is preparing to launch iAd, an advertising platform based on the newly-acquired Quattro Wireless technology, a company that was the second choice for Apple after the Admob deal fell through. "We tried to buy AdMob, but Google snatched them up because they didn't want us to have them," Steve Jobs said during the April keynote. "So we bought another smaller company, Quattro. But we're babes in the woods." But these "babes" are toting means guns, some say. A couple companies see the language in section 3.3.9 as a direct shot at AdMob in the same way that the changes in 3.3.1 were a shot at Adobe. That is, instead of allowing Google to get its mobile advertisements onto the iPhone, Apple can keep them out via the new analytics/ad ban. Whether or not that's the case is certainly up for debate. But considering that the Google/AdMob deal is still being researched by U.S. antitrust enforcers, regulators aware of the issue. Word has it that Google even pointed it out to the FTC, just in case. Continue Reading: Next page, "A Second Opinion" A Second Opinion: Privacy Concerns Others, however, say these changes aren't really about analytics, ads and anti-competitive behavior as much as they are about privacy concerns. In speaking with Alan Chapell, chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association Privacy Committee and whose firm advises companies on privacy and data strategy, the changes to Apple's agreement have to do more with consumer privacy than anything else. With language that refers to "geo-location" and targeted advertising, a good bit of Section 3.3.9 is about how location-based applications should behave. With the rise of location-based services especially and location-based social tools like Loopt, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others, privacy is at the forefront of everyone's minds these days. ( Including ours ). There are no standards for location based data yet, Chapell explains. No rules about how such data should be used, retained, shared and so on. In addition, Apple is under heavy pressure from regulators to protect the privacy of its customers. And if the third-party analytics providers do something which comprises that privacy, it will be Apple that gets in trouble. "This debate is about privacy and innovation," Chapell notes, "and finding a balance between the two." Unfortunately, even if Apple chooses never to enforce the new rules, explains Chapell, the changes will have an indirect impact on innovation in this area. The next round of ad networks, analytics providers and other in-app data-sharing tools will be less likely to be funded. Not Just Funding at Risk... These changes won't just affect the funding of services like those noted above, though, they could affect how services are developed for the iPhone. Take for example, Xtify , a location-triggered geo-messaging system now available for Android ( previous coverage ). The company's VP of Business Development, Joshua Schmiffman, says they're still figuring out what this all means, but they will have some location-triggered functionality for the iPhone. "We are going to try," he says, "but it may not be exactly 'real time.'" That is, if it ever comes to the iPhone at all. Backup Plans: 1st-Party Analytics, "Trust in Apple" As for Localytics , a small-time analytics provider for mobile apps, the decision is to focus more on the company's soon-to-launch enterprise solution. The upcoming offering will allow application publishers to directly collect and process app analytics data, without going through a 3rd party. Ashish Chordia, CEO and Founder of AppDiscover , an iPhone application development and analytics company, is also generally unconcerned with the changes. "While the wording of the terms in section 3.3.9 is quite strict, Apple will not enforce this specific term," he writes in an email. "Enforcing this term would mean rejecting a huge number of apps. Moreover these analytic services are very important for a healthy market for free / ad-supported apps, so that there can be transparency behind the CPM / CPA pricing." On a call, he tells us that several of the company's analytics-enabled apps have made it into the App Store since the agreement was released. Essentially, Cordia believes that Apple will selectively enforce this restriction, but it won't affect applications like his. "Looking Forward to More Insights" Outside of public statements like those received from Flurry and Motally (the latter: "We've reached out to Apple for clarification and are looking forward for more insights into the policy."), the backchannel whispers are that this whole iAd thing is worrisome right now, but not deadly...at least, not yet. But when reading through the initial hands-on reviews of iAd, like the recent one from ad agency Hill Holiday which spoke of iAd's impressive granularity, there are concerns that Apple wants to now dominate where the third-party analytics providers once did. In the meantime, you can count us among those who are also "looking forward to more insights" from Apple. But we're not holding our breath. Image credits: Toy Story iAd, Hill Holiday ; Steve Jobs, gdgt Discuss
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Is Apple Booting iAd's Competition from the iPhone?
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How do you connect to Twitter and understand its value and performance? That's part of the challenge for any enterprise considering how to adopt social technologies to connect with customers. This week at Sugarcon we heard a lot about how to manage a social CRM envrionment. Increasingly, companies are turning to API's for integrating third-party applications like Twitter to better connect and interact with customers. Sponsor Sonoa Systems calls it an API economy with Twitter serving as the most applied API on the planet. To manage API's, Sonoa offers Apigee , a free self-service for developers working with API's. This week at the Chirp conference, Sonoa broadened Apigee by providing analytics, monitoring, debugging and testing tools. For example, with API Analytics a customer may monitor usage levels, review usage patterns, see the geo-location and look at performance metrics like response time. The service now also allows users to share messages with other developers to help with troubleshooting and community learning. API management will become a major requirement for the enterprise, especially as more applications integrate into CRM environments. As Paul Greenberg stated in his keynote at Sugarcon, the focus is no longer about controlling the customer contact but interacting with the customer in the fashion they wish to communicate. [Disclosure: SugarCRM paid for a plane ticket for Alex Williams to attend SugarCon in San Francisco.] Discuss
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Sonoa Broadens Twitter API Management Service
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For the past few days, we attended SAS and SugarCRM user conferences in Seattle and San Francisco. These are just a few of the observations that comes from conversations with developers, business managers, product managers, entrepreneurs and executive management. At both companies, you see the influence of social technologies in the discussions and what their partners are offering. With this social wave comes a variety of new methods to crack the biggest nut: "The most effective way to organize, discover and share information." We've been pounding on that last issue for the past week. We have numerous examples for how web applications can be aggregated into environments like SugarCRM but its the complexity of organizing that data which becomes the biggest challenge. Sponsor The consumer social networks give people lots of ways to use applications. For example, Twitter is a hub for delivering messages to external sites from the application or services such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic. It is a bridge for external services that provide data services that aggregate Twitter data to be uses for specific uses. Recommendation services like Mr. Tweet provide a person with references to other people the individual may want to follow. The enterprise is a different beast. It is not the most popular for the hungry young entrepreneurs and developers we met at companies like Twillio Tuesday night on the eve of Chirp, the Twitter developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Still, in conversations there, we met a few people who are developing for the enterprise environment. What they bring is a fresh look at how the social technologies apply in a world where compliance issues abound, complex processes rule the day and knowledge often exists in ERP silos and email archives. What these young people see are front-end tools like Google Wave that serve as the foundation for collaborative services. These are platforms, for instance, that seek to eliminate email from the process. These young developers create a certain effect. They've developed ways to organize and share information that the enterprise accepts. So much so that the giants have developed their own services, again, in many respects, inspired by the developers building web oriented platforms. And it is having a transformative effect. On Sunday night, we sat in a conference hall at the Washington Convention Center. It was the 35th anniversary of the SAS Users Conference. It was our first time attending. Twitter was the focal part of the opening. Large screens showed the Twitter updates. Their vice president of marketing used his time on stage to push out his second tweet...ever. The singing group even tried to collaborate with the crowd to create an improvised song from their Twitter stream. We learned the next day that this was a first for SAS. Twitter and the variety of other social technologies in the market are giving this conservative, data analytics company a new view, best illustrated in the launch this week of its Social Media Analytics platform. It's a complete, powerful service that takes structured and unstructured data from social networks, applies it to preset rules and delver the results in a dashboard environment. It's lacking a certain level of automation. It's not self-service by any means. It requires SAS to do the analysis and then present it through a web site. But that's okay. The service acts as a pivot that gives SAS the capability to move into new markets. It moves them from the back of the deal to the front of the deal. In the back of the deal, for instance, SAS helps analyze customer guarantees. They do a lot more than that but it's an example of the textual analysis the company provides. Now they have greater access to the front side of the deal to. They can use the platform to reach into agencies where they can help customers craft brand strategies. That should have an effect all of its own. It gives SAS the opportunity to interact with marketers, designers and UI specialists. They may recruit a few people or take the knowledge inside the company and turn it into something. That should help SAS improve the Social Media Analytics platform, making it a service that is more easily available for users to do more on their own. At SugarCon, the story is also a social one. Perhaps best summed up in the second day keynote by Paul Greenberg: "Do You Really Have To Worry About the Social Customer?" I am not so sure you have to worry about a social customer. But it might be a good idea to get know them a little bit better so you can build on your own transformations, whatever they may be. Discuss
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From Seattle to San Francisco, Social is Everything
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SAS introduced a social media analytics program today that will compete against the major metrics players such as Radian 6 and WebTrends . The new service shows once again how blogs and social networks are deeply influencing marketing, customer support and product groups within the enterprise. The SAS Social Media analytics service is different than many of the social technologies we look at in our coverage. It's a hosted service that SAS builds for the client. The client develops the parameters for what they want to analyze. Rules are established that then server as the framework. Results are viewed through a web page that SAS sets up for the client. Sponsor Most of the services we see are delivered as a SaaS solution. For example, Salesforce.com went live recently with Chatter that integrates Twitter, Facebook and other services. But SAS is a company with analytics at its core. It will take about a year for the company to build up the IP, the data, for specific market verticals. After that time, down, the road, it's a service that could be delivered from the cloud. But the learning behavior may be its key differentiator. Mark Chaves, product manager, SAS, said the service can be optimized to learn, based on inputs. For example, the sentiment analysis can be changed to reflect what has been learned. With most services, the sentiment analysis parameters are defined within the application and can not be altered. The service reminds us a lot of what we see emerging in data analytics for the enterprise. The SAS service imports data from internal and external sources. It can archive and analyze more than two years of information from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, discussion forums, blogs and other sources. It is designed to provide a form of predictive analytics that can be applied, for example, to develop marketing strategies such as brand development. Some of the other features include: Analyzes structured and unstructured data from internal and external sources. Quantifies influence, forecast future volume of social media conversations, and then predict their impact on the business. Multiple language support. Web-based dashboard. SAS Social Media Analytics platform shows how deep social technologies are filtering into the enterprise. It's important to identify data from social networks as additional data points that when integrated can provide insights, for instance, into campaigns and CRM environments. The SAS offering reflects the DNA of the company. The focus is on data analytics. That seems like a logical approach. Social networks are producing data at an exponential rate. The SAS offering reflects how it is becoming more of a science to analyze the information from these networks and how its outcomes affect the entire enterprise. Disclosure: SAS paid for a train ticket and hotel room for Alex Williams to attend the the SAS Users Conference in Seattle.] Discuss
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Social Media Analysis: SAS Makes Its Play
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