Blog

23
Jason Ford
Jul. 23, 2010

We are the Powerpoint of social media

Back in the day, there wasn't a suite of tools called Microsoft Office. There were just word processors, spreadsheets, and other stand-alone business tools. Eventually the tools were packaged and sold as a unit. Microsoft Office, iWork, Google Docs, etc.

At some point social media tools will be packaged in a similar way, but right now we are still in the era of stand-alone tools: HooteSuite, CoTweet, Spredfast, Radian6, etc. Each tool has a specific purpose and function. FeedMagnet is one of the first in a new category of tools. In our analogy, we are the Powerpoint (we actually prefer Keynote, but you get the idea) of social media.

Read more »

29
Jason Ford
Jun. 29, 2010

Where is everybody?

Sometimes where someone is can be just as important as what they are doing or saying. Many of our social media sources, including Flickr and Twitter, provide geodata (latitude and longitude) for updates, letting you know where the photo or tweet was recorded. With our latest updates, FeedMagnet now knows what to do with that data.

In addition to tracking check-ins from Gowalla and Foursquare, we're storing geodata given to us from Flickr, Twitter, and other sources. Its up to you how the location information gets displayed. It can be displayed in text form (e.g. "in Austin, TX") or by plotting updates on a map.

Read more »

15
Jason Ford
Jun. 15, 2010

Gowalla & Foursquare

One of the benefits of software-as-a-service—in addition to not having to maintain servers and continually purchase upgrades—is the continual rollout of new features. For FeedMagnet, many of those new features come in the form of new content sources, and our two new ones are the fun, location-based, Gowalla and Foursquare.

Read more »

7
Jason Ford
Jun. 7, 2010

Another new source: Tumblr

You've been able to pull blogs into FeedMagnet since the beginning—really anything that has an RSS feed can be pulled in. The trouble with Tumblr is that it is often much more than blog content. In addition to several text update formats, Tumblr lets you post photo, video, and audio updates.

Our latest integration lets you add Tumblr sources natively rather than through RSS—which means we recognize all of those different Tumblr sources and handle them appropriately. The end result is a better looking FeedMagnet output when Tumblr is involved.

Read more »

11
Jason Ford
May. 11, 2010

Facebook added as a source!

Just a week after Facebook launched their new Graph API, we released support for Facebook as a FeedMagnet content source. You can now run searches across all public posts in Facebook or pull in all of the public posts from a specific user or group of users - just like you could already with Twitter and Flickr.

Read more »

23
Jason Ford
Apr. 23, 2010

Social Commerce Summit 2010

About a week before this year's Social Commerce Summit, we got a call from Bazaarvoice wanting to use FeedMagnet at the event. The Social Commerce Summit is an event geared toward the marketing and social media leaders of the top companies in the world. It is put on by Bazaarvoice, and most - but not all - of the attendees are their clients.

The theme of the conference is using social interactions to help sell products. It's a great fit for Bazaarvoice, since their products are about capturing and displaying user generated ratings, reviews, stories, and other interactions. It's also a great fit for FeedMagnet since our product does a very similar thing - the difference being that we gather existing content from social networks as opposed to soliciting users to write content directly on the commerce site.

Read more »

19
Jason Ford
Apr. 19, 2010

Social Media Strategy Whitepaper

We just published a new white paper on the 5 Pillars of Social Media Strategy: Listen. Create. Engage. Promote. Maximize. Read it at the link below:

» 5 Pillars of Social Media Strategy

Read more »

15
Jason Ford
Mar. 15, 2010

Content Curation = Marketing Credibility

We're about half-way through this year's SXSW, and one word I've heard a lot so far is "curation." It seems there is a problem with content on the Web, and a lot of people feel like curation is the answer.

The problem is information overload. We envision the flow of content online as a stream or a river — flowing peacefully by. In reality it is more of a disorganized scramble to consume as much crap as we can. And most of the content out there is, in fact, crap.

Just as we need a museum curator to help us sort out the masterpieces from every day art, content curators can help identify the small percent of content out there that is worth consuming.

As it turns out, this is exactly the role that FeedMagnet provides for marketers.

Read more »

12
Jason Ford
Mar. 12, 2010

Crayons & Aspirin

I attended a half-day seminar by Mike McDerment, the CEO of FreshBooks, yesterday. One of the things he talked about was crayons and aspirin. He says that every good web app is either a crayon, helping you create something new or increasing revenue, or an aspirin, relieving pain by making things easier or saving time. I think he is spot on.

FreshBooks is an aspirin. It takes the pain out of invoicing. SalesForce.com is a crayon. It provides tools that help do more with your business and increase sales and revenue. Both are great web apps.

Read more »

15
Jason Ford
Feb. 15, 2010

Google Buzz? We can do that.

I've had a few people ask how Google Buzz will impact FeedMagnet - which is a great question. A lot of social media tools are locked in to only work with Twitter, RSS, or some other specific source. We made the strategic decision with FeedMagnet to support any source that provides a content feed for us to pull from. So we welcome Google Buzz with enthusiasm.

Read more »

5
Jason Ford
Feb. 5, 2010

FeedMagnet at the Verge 2010 Conference

We're powering a live social media stream on dozens of screens at the Verge 2010 conference right now in Austin. 2,100 attendees are able to participate by posting to Twitter, Flickr, Twitpic, yFrog, and other social media sites. Their updates are shown live for everyone to see just a minute or two after they post them. The attendees of the conference are mostly from churches that are experimenting with ways to get their churches more on mission. One way they can do that is by using FeedMagnet with for their churches

Here's an inside look into how we're powering the conference.

Read more »

31
Jason Ford
Jan. 31, 2010

CheddarGetter for Python and Django

We believe in the philosophy of not reinventing the wheel if we don't have to. That's why we use Django as our development framework. And that's why we decided to use CheddarGetter - a web service that takes care of all of our recurring credit card billing. We wrote a wrapper for CheddarGetter in Python, called PyCheddar, and have released it as open source so others can take advantage of it as well.

Read more »

20
Jason Ford
Jan. 20, 2010

Pulling in photos and video makes tweets look better

FeedMagnet pulls in more than just text and links. A Twitter stream by itself can be kind of lame - all plain text - but there is usually a lot of really interesting content in there buried in the links. Photos, videos, news articles, and other content can all be found in plain text tweets. FeedMagnet makes things more interesting by pulling that content in and showing it instead of the plain link.

Read more »

23
Jason Ford
Dec. 23, 2009

How Trident's Twitter Experiment In USA Today Can Be Repeated Online

Trident recently ran a full-page ad in USA Today featuring tweets from real people talking about their new Layers gum. They got a bunch of press for it - and it was a pretty effective ad. People trust their peers more than they trust marketers. Seeing a bunch of tweets from real people lends credibility to Trident. If they had used marketing copy to say the same things, it would be less genuine.

This is the benefit of peer endorsement that brands can get from social media. Someone on Twitter responded by saying: "Lightbulbs blowing up over CEO heads across America." I sure hope so - because that same benefit can be had online using FeedMagnet.

Read more »

18
Jason Ford
Dec. 18, 2009

New: Google News and Twitter Lists

We really weren't kidding when we said we'd be rolling out new features quickly. Two days after launching the beta, we just rolled out two new content sources: Google News and Twitter Lists.

We've also made a few tweaks to your list of Authors and Search Topics. Our goal was to make it easier for you to find and view the content you are pulling in. Let us know what you think!

Read more »

16
Jason Ford
Dec. 16, 2009

We're live! Public beta launched today.

We launched the free beta of FeedMagnet to the public today.

This is just beginning. We're working on a ton of new features that we'll be rolling out over the next few months. What we're most interested in at this point is your feedback. Set up some feeds, stick the widget up on your website, and then let us know what you thought of the experience and what features you would like most to see over the coming weeks.

Read more »

11
Jason Ford
Dec. 11, 2009

Mastering Custom Segmentation in Google Analytics

Google has made some major strides in adding new features to Google Analytics over the past year. I used to recommend Google Analytics for basic tracking needs and Omniture (which is expensive) for when custom user tracking or goal conversion was required. After spending some time playing with the new custom variables and segmentation features in Google Analytics, I think I can say that for the vast majority of websites I've worked on - even those run by large enterprise companies with complex requirements - Google Analytics is all you need. And the best part is, it's free.

Read more »

25
Jason Ford
Nov. 25, 2009

Twitter is a "language we speak"

I just came across this paragraph on the #140conf website:

At the #140conf events, we look at twitter as a platform and as a language we speak. Over time it will neither be the only platform nor the only language. #140conf is not an event about microblogging or the place where people share twitter “tips and techniques” but rather where we explore the effects of the real-time Internet on Business.

I'm 100% on board with this idea.

Read more »

19
Luke Sneeringer
Nov. 19, 2009

Simple JavaScript Date Formatting

This week, in anticipation of our alpha launch, Jason asked me to write a mechanism for giving a user the ability to embed one of our feeds on their webpage. You know the drill here; we give them a box of code to copy and paste onto their page, and then after that it just sort of magically works. Anyway, in the process of doing this, I was at a point where I wanted to format what the date and time would look like.

Jason and I do a pretty good job of talking about what's coming around the corner, and he'd mentioned to me in passing that one thing he'd like in the future is a mechanism to allow the user to customize what the time formatting looked like, so I wanted to make sure I planned for that in advance. So, this morning I took on the challenge of taking a JavaScript date object (created from an integer Unix timestamp) and formatting it.

I decided that the best use of time was probably just to write a function to take a date and output it in an arbitrary way, rather than hard-coding the exact formatting we were going to use to start. That would allow me to easily accept an arbitrary format later, and also allow Jason some flexibility if he didn't like how one of the formats looked when he saw the final page; he could just edit the format string rather than asking me to revisit the date formatter.

Read more »

13
Jason Ford
Nov. 13, 2009

Grid Design with Sass

We are a little fanatical about grid-design with FeedMagnet.com. We spend time making sure every element of our pages lines up to the pixel with the grid. There are a number of tools that can be used for grid design in CSS, but we chose to use a couple tools that are still a little less common among designers - Sass and Compass - because of the flexibility they provide.

Read more »

9
Jason Ford
Nov. 9, 2009

Django vs. Rails

One of our first tasks getting started building FeedMagnet was to pick a development framework. I built the original prototype of FeedMagnet in PHP because it was the language I knew. When I decided to hire a developer and build out a production version of FeedMagnet, I knew I didn't want to stick with PHP for a number of reasons - the main one being that I wanted to develop in a top-notch framework and I didn't feel like CakePHP and CodeIgniter were quite there yet. I've had a number of people ask me how I made the ultimate decision to go with Django, so I decided to write this post to answer that question and hopefully help others who end up in my shoes to make the right decision.

Read more »

4
Jason Ford
Nov. 4, 2009

10 free tools every small business should be using

I think most people are aware by now that the world of software is changing - moving from expensive applications that you purchase for each of your computers to online "software as a service" that you pay for monthly. FeedMagnet itself falls in this category of new software. And and as a part of us eating our own dog food, we are running pretty much every aspect of our business with other software-as-a-service apps.

One of the by-products of this new model for software is a plethora of free services that small and startup business can benefit from. Most of these new tools have a "fremium" monetization model - providing a free version of the product and then selling premium features at a monthly cost (this is our plan for FeedMagnet, btw). As a result, there are a number of products that can be used to power your business for free - at least until you grow to the point where you need the more advanced features.

There are a ton of these apps available, but in this post, I'll cover a handful of the ones that are particularly useful for small businesses.

Read more »

29
Jason Ford
Oct. 29, 2009

Well hello. Thanks for checking us out.

We're just getting started building FeedMagnet and we're super excited about it. FeedMagnet is a new web app that helps businesses harness social media - and do it in a responsible way. We'll be using this blog to let you know about new features we're rolling out, provide a behind-the-scenes look at our development process, and share some of our ideas about the Web in general.

Read more »