There are a ton of social media monitoring tools out there, from the enterprise class tools, including Radian 6, Alterian and Scoutlabs to consumer-focused apps, including one I'd long relied on, TweetBeep, which would send me alerts by e-mail when keywords flowed through Twitter. But TweetBeep first became unreliable, and then practically disappeared, as e-mails from the service unexpectedly came to a stop about six weeks ago. In its place, I've turned to a newer product, in beta, called SocialPing, which sends me daily summaries of tracked terms, graphs them over time, and can even alert me in near real-time if I request it.

SocialPing bills itself as "serious Twitter monitoring, for serious people and serious companies", and it does a very good job, providing both real-time reports or nightly summaries by e-mail that populate my in box around midnight.


If you have gained access to SocialPing, you can start by telling the service what keywords to follow. This is done through tags. Tell it to watch for specific term or phrase, and whether you want to be notified instantly by e-mail, in a daily digest, or by Twitter DM or SMS. The product promises to soon track keywords on a destination URL, to track links to a specific Web site, or even tracking a specific URL. Essentially, if it's in text and it's on Twitter, SocialPing can find it.


Once you're set with a keyword or several, the data will begin to populate your dashboard. The dashboard shows the number of tweets that matched your keyword in the last 24 hours, and how many potential followers they may have reached. You can see spikes and lows corresponding with the time of those tweets, and can dive deep into the graph to see what the specific tweets said.


Since turning on SocialPing on April 1st, the product has kept all historical data, meaning I now have 5 weeks worth of graphs to see if words I am tracking are rising or falling, and can see if the mentions are primarily new tweets or retweets, and if that percentage is changing over time.

SocialPing also summarizes the activity to show the top users who have mentioned your keyword, sorted by follower count or by the total number of mentions. These reports are consistent both on the Web site and in the nightly e-mails.

With TweetBeep fading away for me, SocialPing has more than picked up the slack. It may not run deep queries or gauge sentiment analysis, as enterprise class systems do, but it is very solid. I recommend getting into their private beta and setting up a few queries yourself if you think that would be useful. Unsurprisingly, you can track them down at http://www.socialping.com or at @socialping on Twitter. No sign of the company focusing on additional networks any time soon, and it's unclear when they'll open for business from all, so get in early if you want access.

A month or so ago, I told you how I'd finally jumped on the location check-in train, and mockingly asked if boring married people (like me) should be checking in on services like Foursquare and Gowalla. In the time since that post, I continue to be married, continue to be boring, and yes, I continue to check in. I believe that if one is truly going to commit themselves to a tool like this, they should do so in full. But from what I have seen, it looks like many people edit their comings and goings, in an effort to obscure the mundane, or possibly to make their average lives appear exemplary. And by going against the grain, I am becoming the unequalled Mayor of Mediocre.

As anticipated when I started my smirk-laden quest to prove the utility (or lack thereof) of location apps, I quickly gained mayorship of client offices up and down the Peninsula, and even in the East Bay. I picked up a crown at a supermarket in Woodside with only two stops and never looked back, and at one point, I achieved every man's dream - becoming mayor of a Burger King and Wendy's simultaneously. My mother must be so proud.


Because I decided I would use Foursquare to accurately show just where I go and what I do, I've racked up plenty of stops at the neighborhood Safeway, and even recently became the mayor of my kids' pediatrician's office (again after only two stops). Given the combination of relatively low use of such apps in the South Bay, and my own antisocial behavior, the overlap with other friend's activity has been inconsistent at best - and the lack of a challenge in overtaking these mundane places was due to what I believe is self-censoring on the part of many users, who don't really want to broadcast to the world what it is they are doing.

While I may have no hesitation in reporting I am at 7-Eleven, or pumping gas, or shopping for groceries, or asking the docs to look into my son's fever, and check in from the Drive Thru at McDonald's, many of those I am connected to are keeping their own check-in history to be more hipster friendly. One still sees the Friday night flurry as the singles chase each other from bar to bar, the self-important announcements of major travel from state to state, check-ins at "happening" venues and events, or at more classy restaurants than the grease pits I'm owning.


But what's missing are the rest of the small updates. Post offices. Dry cleaners. Car rentals. Clothing stores. It looks like it's a lot more hip to check into an Apple Store than a Ross or a Mervyn's, or a Starbucks instead of a Jack in the Box.


The self-censorship and muting of life's reality adds cloak of dissonance to the entire process. While it's true I am still playing with checking in at random Apple buildings in Cupertino in an attempt to draw out Steve Jobs' henchmen, and thus have my own issues with "telling the truth", I wonder what those who are holding back on their check-ins are trying to hide. Do you think you're going to bore your friends with who you really are?


One more thing - sharing your real life can have real life benefits. This week, when at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital for a 20-week ultrasound on our Fall addition to the family, I got an e-mail from a friend who had very real concern that maybe one of our kids had taken a turn for the worse. (See his writeup: Privacy vs Voyeurism) The world of virtual check-ins turned into a real one. If you become real, and share who you really are, you can get real-world connections with real people who really care, so stop hiding and stop filtering.

In a short note on the less-visible Twitter Media site, Twitter praised ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick's (@marshallk) use of highlighting tweets as quotes to provide context, and said that these can be seen as providing perfect integrity for quotes, something missing in the world of redirects, spin and the proverbial misquotes. While it's no surprise that Twitter likes people highlighting Twitter, they suggest an alternative to the copy/paste approach to getting a tweet from their site to yours, and they promise it is coming tomorrow.

They say: "the truth, of course, is that a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack. We have an alternative to propose; it’s coming tomorrow."

The art of copying and pasting tweets into stories is fairly commonplace. Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag practically does it every day. (See: Overheard: Facebook's CEO Hates Privacy from Thursday) With Twitter becoming the source for more information, an official solution, assuming it is customizable and elegant, like the company's existing widgets, will be welcome.


Of course, copying and pasting one's tweet and saving it as an image (as I did above) puts the power in the publisher's hands, and doesn't rely on a third party site, like Twitter, to host the content. It also keeps the tweet intact should it be deleted later by the source. Looking forward to what gets introduced tomorrow.

In the last few years, much of the Web's focus has trended toward social networks and microblogging, and away from more traditional blogging. Twitter and Facebook are on the tips of most people's tongues, even when those sites often serve as much to link to news and blogs elsewhere, in addition to the much-lauded status updates. Regator, the blog search engine which debuted in mid 2008, and introduced a solid iPhone app one year later, is poised to revamp its service while keeping blog content front and center. The result, in preview now, is a solid data mine for content, trends and topics. In theory, the site could outright replace Web 1.0 engines like Technorati, and it looks to be significantly more useful - no matter your focus of interest.

Regator still presents itself as surfacing the world's best blog posts from the world's best blogs. Not all make it in the highly selective network, but there are many quality sources that do in practically every subject, from Academics and Arts to Politics, Religion and Tech.

Regator's new preview steps up its blog coverage by showing trending topics, as Technorati never got quite right and Twitter and Google News have for their own properties. From global trends (such as Times Square and the Gulf of Mexico) to topical trends (such as Steve Jobs and the iPad 3G), Regator quickly updates you at a glance on what the blog world is talking about.

As the site does now, you can still see popular and new stories by topic, as well as those with audio or video. But you can take a step further with two new sections, including trends and monitoring.


With Regator's deep archive of blog topics, you can compare up to three keywords, and see how they are spiking over time. Not unsurprisingly, Gizmodo spiked well beyond Engadget around their iPhone 4 coverage, and Apple dwarfs almost anybody else during Steve Jobs keynotes. You can see first day launches of products like Google Buzz, and the ensuing fade of coverage, or you can see consistent updates on more broad terms, such as "laptop", which only shows dips every weekend.


Should one-time visits to the site not be enough, you can tap into Regator's blog monitor to follow keywords and send you updates on these keywords - much like Google News alerts and TweetBeep.


Regator may have started out as a way for the community to help find the best of the Web through up arrows and down arrows, but its upcoming revamp, which you can gain access through via invites, looks solid enough to be the highest quality blog search available, with deep trendspotting. I will keep using Icerocket search for finding all mentions from all blogs, but Regator has trimmed the fat and returned with the best.

Just go to http://preview.regator.com with the invite code: "louisgraysentme" and check it out for yourself.