Sadly it’s not uncommon here in Silicon Vally to hear people say they will only name their children with names where the dotcom is available.
Often talking about unique spellings to common names, such as making Mark into Maarkh and Jessica would be spelled Jesshika, you get the idea.
So it was just a matter of time untill the idea became a website.
Babysquatter, discovered over on Bridal Musings, is a tool that tells you which domain names are available that match your future childs name.
After you enter the name you want to reserve, it does a quick search and shows you what’s free. If there is a domain you want to grab, just register the domain with one click with godaddy.
Now all we need is for Babysquatter to reserve Facebook vanity URL’s, Twitter ID’s, Posterous names and Gmail addresses to make the complete set. Oh wait, there’s Namechk.Bridal Musings, Pixdaus
Ever feel that your Mac speakers aren’t loud enough? We may have an app to solve your audio frustration.
Boom, a volume booster app, will crank the audio output on your Mac up to 400%. Whether your main thing is watching YouTube videos or it’s listening to tracks on iTunes, Boom will dramatically pump up the volume.
The audio boosting app that recently won a Best in Show award at Macworld 2011, works with any application on Mac including iChat, Quicktime and Skype. It will also jack up the volume while streaming media on the web with sites such as YouTube.
Volume Slider
After installing Boom, a handy volume slider will be readily available within the taskbar. This is a lot easier than having to fire up the app and, it clearly displays whether the boom volume is on or off.
Presets & Equalizer
While increasing the volume is great, it’s not the only feature found within Boom. Users also have the option to choose from various presets to customize the sound.
Each one of the presets including bass boost and treble boost, can be tweaked to suit the listener’s preferences but it additionally gives users the option to create and name their own pre-defined sounds using the equalizer. They’ve also included presets for both music and movies that were specifically designed for the aforementioned media types.
Boost a File
Another cool feature within Boom will boost the volume of your audio files by dragging and dropping a supported file into the app. By doing this, Boom will automatically boost the audio level of the file or song and it will sync them to iTunes, allowing you to later throw them on your iPhone or iPod.
The boost file option supports mp3, m4a, aiff, caf and wav.
The Bottom Line
If you’re not satisfied with the audio levels on your Mac, Boom will be worth the $4.99 for you. Global Delight, the developers of the app have provided a free trial download on the site so you’ll have a chance to play around with it before buying. Compared to my Macbook Pro, the sound volume of my older Macbook is seriously lacking so I put Boom to the test using the older model. Overall the result was quite impressive and seemed to roughly double the volume of the audio output, although, the developers do promise its boosts audio by up to 400 percent.
How do you monitor on Twitter who stopped following you and started to follow a competitor? What would be the fastest way to compare how many Twitter followers you share with another Twitter account? Both answers and more can be found using Social Grapple.
The site is still in early development and was built by Andrey Petrov. Petrov previously built another Twitter service called Tweetspect where the idea for Social Grapple was originally devloped.
Social Grapple is a service that gives you detailed analytics from Twitter across different accounts. There is long list of Twitter analytics services that allow you to monitor accounts. Some like TwitterCounter allows you to compare follower counts with competitors like the free version Social Grapple. But it is the only services that allow you to compare the information about followers across accounts that you do not own.
The site is easy to use but if you really want to experience it fully the free service will not be much use. There are two premium packages Social Butterfly for $10/month and Kingpin for $40/month, which vary on the size of the account you want to monitor.
After you upgrade your account you need to wait a few days for it to collate the data. At the end of each night the service pulls in new information. I upgraded two accounts, my personal Twitter account @FatemaYasmine and Petrov’s account @shazow.
Once the upgrade has been completed 6 buttons will appear: Tweets, Followers, Following, Mutual, Stalking and Stalkers. Pressing any of these buttons shows a graph.
The Buttons are self explanatory visualization of time graphs.
Stalker Graph (above) – My stalkers increased as I joined TNW
Below the graph there is a detailed report of changes that have happened with your followers with tags next to them. The tags represent important bits of information about the account which allow you to quickly skim and determine which accounts are worth paying attention to (high ratio, mutual, stalking) and which accounts may be spammers (badratio, new).
Another big feature is comparing accounts. There is a box on the top left and when filled it takes you to a diagram that compares both accounts and highlights how many mutual Tweeps you both follow or follow you
Having access to this information about a competitor is powerful, it blows wide open the doors for Twitter customer poaching. Additionally with the analytics it is possible to determine which events triggered a sudden rush of followers to both you or a competitor, like a new marketing campaign. The converse of that would also be possible, track an event that lead to a mass exodus of followers.
Additional features that we can expect soon are:
Daily/weekly activity summary emails.
Tracking how long a follower has been following you. So when someone unfollows you, you’ll see “@x unfollowed you after 3 months.”
Increasing the report granularity from daily to hourly.
If you are a business or a marketing person or anyone that is interested in Twitter and the relationship followers have across different brands this will be a must use service for you.
SocialGrapple has given TNW 5 Social Butterfly accounts for our readers. To be in with a chance to win please leave a comment saying why you would like to use it along with your Twitter ID.HN, Wallpaper
Measuring social media is one of the areas of online marketing that is still frequently discussed and we still haven’t found that magic number yet! But there are lots of free tools that can help to monitor and track your social media activity to ensure it’s working for you or you’re reaching your targets.
The list presented below is intended as a guide, I don’t recommend you use them all at once, but find the ones that fit best for you and make sure you continually measure and record results, to see how your social media activity is performing overall.
Facebook Analytics
Starting with my favourite free social measurement tool – Facebook Insights. Facebook provide you with a comprehensive analytics suite for pages that allows you to get a full insight into your fans and how they’re interacting on the page. Facebook Insights is split into 2 main sections : users and insights. Users gives you all the basic information you need on your fans, including active users, the number of unlikes on your page, as well as information on traffic sources and referrers. Interactions gives you a deeper analysis into the individual updates you’ve made on your page and how people have interacted. This is great to get a quick overview of the kind of content that works and doesn’t work, so you can find out what your fans really want from your page
Topsy
Now Twitter’s own search tool is certainly pretty advanced, allowing you to search by location, keywords you want to include and even sentiment on particular tweets. But a more comprehensive search engine that allows you to scan back further through tweets is Topsy. The screenshot below shows the insight you get into search terms, showing you how many others have retweeted, preview of the full links contained in tweets and allowing you to filter easily by hour, day, week, month or year. It is certainly one of the most comprehensive Twitter search engines I’ve seen, which doesn’t seem to get talked about as much as it should be!
Youtube Insight
Youtube analytics can be accessed on youtube channels by clicking on ‘Account’ then ‘Insight’ along the top of the page. Youtube have made a lot of changes to their Insight product lately and it’s incredibly useful for channel owners. As well as giving information on the total video views and demographic breakdown, Youtube Insight offers a lot more than this, such as which countries your videos are popular in and a summary of which of your videos are getting the most interest as well as how long people are watching them for. If you’re investing in branded video content then you should be looking at these stats constantly to make sure you’re improving your videos as you go, reacting to what people are interested in and what’s holding their attention.
Tweetstats
Tweetstats is a handy free tool for measuring Twitter, who, according to the site are ‘in ur tweets, graphin ur stats’. This is pretty much exactly what they do! All you need to do to use Tweetstats is enter your Twitter name then it will access your tweets to show you a graph of how many tweets you’re sending each day and the number of replies you’re getting. Now on its own this may not really tell you much, but I think this site is best used for looking at competitors for example, to see how often they’re tweeting and how you compare, as well as looking at how your account and level of interaction is growing over time. It also gets pretty clever as you can click into any month to see a more detailed breakdown of tweets sent :
bit.ly
A super-simple, must have tool for anyone that is managing a social media account online. Bit.ly is a universal url shortener that not only provides a handy service in shortening urls but also allows you to access analytics to see how many people are clicking on your link. This is information that you often wouldn’t have access to when posting links on social channels, particularly if you don’t have your own site analytics installed to check referral traffic. While you can use bit.ly to create short urls without logging in, make sure to always create links from your registered account so you can access historical data.
Twitter Analyzer
Twitter Analyzer bills itself as the most advanced Twitter analytics tool in the world, and they’re probably not far wrong. Simply enter your Twitter name – no need to register – and you have access to a host of information around your Twitter account. The first graph shows you your level of tweets over time, but check out the icons below and you can access tailored graphs that show you useful information such as your conversation level, popularity (how many times you’ve been retweeted) and the particularly sexy ‘reach’ graph. This shows you how many readers have been exposed to your tweets. There’s still a few improvements to be made to the site, for example clicking on the graph to show you the links you’ve shared just presents you back with a load of bit.lys without the option to preview, but keep an eye on this as a handy site to use with hopefully lots more to come.
Klout
Klout is certainly getting a lot of attention at the moment, as the emerging standard for online influence. I would advise you to use this tool as a way to benchmark against your competitors, but take the numbers with a pinch of salt. Klout is very easy to use, just enter your Twitter name and you’ll be presented back with your Klout score that takes into account your true reach (how big your audience is), amplification (how likely people are to interact with your content) and network (how influential your community is). The information then gets a lot more complex, giving you a matrix of how influential you are and a summary of the kind of person you are on Twitter. As with any measurement tools, use it continuously to measure and compare, but make sure you’re putting your own meaning on the numbers you’re presented back with.
Also highly recommend you try PeerIndex, another, some might say better, alternative.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a useful real-time search engine, with a bit of a twist. As well as functioning as an easy-to-use search engine, this site offers you more, with the option to receive email alerts every time there’s a new piece of content across social media that contains your keyword. You can also use their widget to display on a blog or site to show visitors a summary of your social buzz. Their search engine is a great way to get a comprehensive overview of your presence on social media, split down by content type to see the areas you’re active in or being discussed.
Twitter Counter
Twitter Counteris a service that, at its core, tracks your activity on Twitter. This includes followers, following, rate of follower growth (or decline), your average number of tweets per day and much more. There’s a convenient graph feature that illustrates your climb or fall pace, but it also allows you to compare yourself to other accounts so if you have direct competition in your niche, this could be an interesting way to compare your progress. Twitter Counter also has an embeddable widget for your blog or website sidebar which highlights the number of recent visitors to your site, but also provides a nice and easy way for people to follow you. Twitter Counter’s premium offering provides you with priority support and a wealth of features. (disclosure: Twitter Counter is part of The Next Web incubator)
Backtype
Backtype is an interesting social media measurement tool, that is helping companies to understand the real business impact of activity through social media. It gives you a comprehensive statistical overview of how people are interacting with your content. To use the site you put your url in, to see information such as comments on your site, tweets, comments on Digg and FriendFeed. But where it gets really clever is with the option to compare your site to others. This allows you see, in numerical terms, how you’re performing among your competitors to give you an idea of how engaged your audience is. Again this is a good idea to benchmark and make sure that you’re constantly improving. There’s lots more to come from this site than what’s currently available and it looks like the site will be introducing paid options soon, but I expect a large portion of information will still be available for free.
Boardreader
This is one of the best forum search engines around. It’s incredibly easy to use, and has a great analytics suite that can be used, if you have a real interest in finding out what people are saying about you in forums, with a view to interacting. The site does have a few faults – the search functionality isn’t that intuitive – but the results available make up for it. You can group search results by time and either view an overall trend in forum mentions, as well as drilling down into individual results to see mentions.
CoComment
CoComment is a very handy browser extension to keep accurately monitoring reaction to comments on blogs. Unless you choose to specifically subscribe to followup comments, it can be hard to keep track of replies left on comments. That’s where CoComment comes in. By using their browser plugin you can help make sure that you don’t lose conversations you started. If you’re commenting on blogs as a business representative then this is especially useful as it’s important to maintain a conversation that you may well have started on someone else’s blog! It also offers an easy to view summary of comments within a page, and get instant notifications when there’s new followup comments.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a great tool for monitoring social media, particularly if you have a larger amount of people using the same profiles. It offers much the same functionality as the likes of CoTweet, but has a better analytics tool. The site analytics offered through the site allow you to see profiles for different sites, making it an efficient way to monitor your activity.
Yahoo Site Explorer
This one’s a bit more old school but definitely deserving of it’s place on the list! Yahoo Site Explorer is a great way to track the inbound links going to your site. It might not be 100% accurate but it’s incredibly useful to get an overview of the kind of people/sites that are linking to you and importantly in what context. When you use the site you’re able to click directly into the results to find your mention or link. It’s also a good way to identify possible links you should be going after, based on what sites are linking to your competitors
Omgili Graphs
It might not be the prettiest site, but Omgili Graphs allows you to access useful information, comparing different search terms. Their graphs show you the amount of Buzz a particular term is getting, which is the level of mentions it’s getting online. It’s useful, real-time information that can be incredibly useful when running campaigns to see how many mentions you’re getting, but can also be used in other ways, for example if you want to find out which of your products is generally more popular online or getting talked about more. It can also be used to highlight particular trends, if you want to see which upcoming events have a higher talkability factor. Don’t be put off by the design, as this is a very useful site, with each graph embeddable on sites.
IceRocket
IceRocket is a blog search engine that allows you to monitor across blogs comprehensively to see where you’re being written about. You can easily enter any search term, but I wouldn’t take the results as 100% accurate as a few test searches I ran didn’t return results that I knew should be there. To get a general overview however it’s a handy tool. You can also view trended results, to see peaks in mentions over time, though you can’t select posts from particular dates.
Compete
This doesn’t fall completely under the remit of social media monitoring, but Compete.com is a useful tool for accessing site traffic either for yourself or your competitors. While the full suite of tools is available as a paid service, there’s still a lot of information available for free, with the ability to compare up to 3 sites to access traffic trends over the past 12 months. As well as showing traffic levels, Compete also gives you a free overview of traffic sources for the particular site and which keywords people are mostly finding you by. I find Compete.com a very useful site to get an overview of how sites are performing over time and if you use the information well, you should also be looking into key peaks in traffic historically, and how you can maximise that through your marketing activity for the next year.
It’s easy to ignore someone when you don’t know or care to know anything about them. But it’s different when that person shows up in your social media stream, telling you about a lonely day on the street or simply wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day.
Underheard in New York is an initiative to help homeless New Yorkers speak for themselves through Twitter. Four homeless people — Danny (@putodanny), Derrick (@awitness2011), Albert (@albert814) and Carlos (@jessie550) — were given their own prepaid cell phone, a month of unlimited text messaging and a Twitter account.
The goal was to raise awareness and give a peek inside the daily struggles and unexpected challenges of being homeless in a major urban city. Between January 2009 and January 2010 the total number of unsheltered individuals within New York City rose an estimated 34%; this figure doesn’t include the tens of thousands staying in shelters.
Underheard in New York’s co-creators provided the men in the project with some basic training on how to access and use Twitter. Underheard in New York (@underheardinNY) was developed by Rosemary Melchior, Robert Weeks and Willy Wang, three interns at the BBH advertising agency. They, like all interns, were issued the challenge: “Do something good… Famously.”
The back half of that mandate is sure to cast aspersions on the project’s motives. The team has been careful and upfront about the challenge. Its website reads: “We decided famous was just another way of saying make people listen. Go big. Be heard. Make real change.” Weeks insists the initiative was started with the utmost sincerity.
While Underheard in New York has no direct fundraising component, Weeks hopes it will help people better understand homelessness and inspire them to volunteer or donate to shelters like the NYC Rescue Mission. The Mission helped select the four men, who all sleep there at night. The Mission has a long-standing relationship with BBH.
Weeks explained that these four men serve as a pilot group that the team hopes to expand with more Twitter accounts and voices from the New York area. Although the co-founders will close the initiative after their internships end, Weeks is looking at a bigger picture. “I think for us the project is over when it’s over, unfortunately. But hopefully the project has a lifecycle beyond what we’re doing. Maybe another organization will adopt our strategies, raise awareness.”
Most of the money and support has been coming from BBH, which has acted as advisors and provided $1,000 in funding, most of which has gone to paying for the phones. Accordingly, the four men are typing away on inexpensive, Samsung clam-shell phones. “Part of the point is that that very basic technology works for what we’re trying to do,” Weeks said.
Right now, the four accounts don’t have a ton of followers but they do contain some moving insights about loneliness, hardship and the basic human kindness shown by — and shown to — these four men.
Is a program like this useful only if it can go viral? What did you make of the tweets and will you be following them? Let us know in the comments below.
Ever feel that your Mac speakers aren’t loud enough? We may have an app to solve your audio frustration.
