Meet the app: Thoughtbuzz- a unique social media management tool

Social media is all fun and games till you decide to make a career out of it. Posting tweets and Instagram pictures in an arbitrary manner is good for the personal use. For earning money and increasing your reach you would need the right social media analytics tools.

There are a lot of social media monitoring companies out there which provides you with numerous products. One of the products which have caught my attention is ThoughtBuzz. It is a ubiquitous platform to provide you with many capabilities and features to handle your social media accounts.

Some of the unique features of the platform.

• Local language support.
• Social inbox and response templates.
• Context Passing and expert recommendation for content creation.
• Advanced analytics capabilities.
• Support from Instagram and YouTube accounts.

Signing up on the platform is pretty easy. You can sign up by email or your Facebook/Twitter/ account. You can add your other social accounts without much hassle once you sign up.

Social Feed is the place where you can get hold of all your feeds, notifications and top fans. It also gives you an insight on the content you post on various accounts. You can also monitor trends, so you can get engaged with them

Social Inbox lets you handle all your conversations from one place. All the messages you receive can be sorted based on priority. There is also a provision for response templates. Also, like your office email box, you can filter what messages you want to see.

ThoughtBuzz also lets you know who your fans are. The people who interact with you the most so you can give special attention to them if needed. You can import followers from the various platforms in just a click. You can gauge your audience applying various filters like geography.

Analysis section gives you great data of your social networks by selecting the date range you want. You’ll get the default graphs to show you various information. Social media monitoring made easy for you.

For instance if you select your twitter account, you’ll be presented with graphs for Follower count, Top RTs, followers by locations and top sources of tweets. You can see various perspectives of your different accounts in an interactive manner.
Overall ThoughtBuzz is the right platform to provide you the social boost you need in various aspects. It satisfies the needs of basic to advanced users for social media tracking.

Twitter: The Closed Kingdom

Every time one of my friends joined Twitter, they asked me,”What the heck I do on this website?”. And this has been the dilemma for anyone who has newly joined the website. There is hardly anything to start the user engagement in the social network.

Last quarter Twitter reported a user growth of mere 1.4%. Although executives are blaming the low numbers partly on the iOS8 bug, their growth has been slowing down significantly over the period of time.

People who are already on twitter from quite some time, find it easy to engage in a conversation or information exchange. Since, as a new user it is hard to find your audience or followers.

Unless of course you become an overnight internet sensation or build your follower base gradually over the time based on a topic of your expertise. And building follower base is very hard. If you have 1000 followers or more you are probably into top 3–4 percentile of users of twitter.

Challenge for Twitter lies in competing with different models other social networks use. For instance, Facebook and Snapchat offers conversations directly with your friends. So you already have an audience over there. And on social networks like Instagram, Soundcloud or YouTube, people are generally in the search of new and unique content. So your chances of getting noticed are high.

On the other hand, twitter is a powerful tool to track news around the word. Look at what your favorite celebrity is doing. Twitter has been constantly rolling out new features to make the social network more engaging. They launched a feature to make interesting tweets from your network appear on your timeline, even if you don’t follow the person.

Twitter also launched the group DM and 30 second direct video feature. Group DM was to make the current user spend more time on the website and video feature was to lure people who have been using vine and Instagram videos extensively.

But twitter’s most interesting update-Instant Timeline, tries to tackle the problem of giving the new users a head start. So, when you sign up on twitter, it prepares an instant timeline with people to follow based on your contacts.

It is intriguing that twitter’s ad revenue has soared over the time. Promoted tweets, they have improved their ad models to provide more options and power to business users. The new set of options for campaigns is going to lead to better targeting of user who’d be willing to participate.

Brands are creating different campaigns for twitter. The social network is playing major part in the elections across the word. It started with India, was extended to Brazil, and now in UK elections new methods of promotion of politicians are being carried out.

There are emotions around the results for Twitter in the last quarter and the last year. Will they snatch the users back from likes of Instagram and Snapchat with new features?

Poli-tech

“You know what happened yesterday?” My roommate showed me the 2nd page of newspaper showing some political news. I had a glance at it and chuckled, “This happened two days back”. My friend told me, “You don’t even follow politics”. I said, “I follow internet”.

Back in 2009 we were stuck to the television when election results being announced, all the debates being followed, phone calls were being made. Then came 2014 and picture had changed dramatically, Television was not the fastest medium to get information, people were glued to TV but the amount had reduced. What happened in between? Technology happened.

I am not a political analyst. I never followed news extensively. But I hardly had to read long articles to just get a gist of what is going on. A glance at Flipboard, Google News stand was enough. Also I had my Twitter and Facebook feed telling me about the latest events. Even when I saw TV news sometimes, the hosts read out tweets from people or the politicians. Facebook sharing mattered. Even jokes or picutres on whatsapp changed people’s mood. Politician’s social media act were monitored consistently.

The technology used in this election was amazing, many leaders held Google Hangouts to reach out to people whom they personally can’t meet. They tweeted out bits of their journeys. Journalists use these medium to express their views. This doesn’t necessarily convert into votes, but it creates more awareness. Many people had more access to information about the candidates through Google election portal and websites like myneta.

Parties like AAP ran their campaigns on internet rigorously. Followers of respective parties also pitched their support by the various social media means. AAP had good support on Twitter, but over all BJP were the one who ruled the internet war. “Ab ki baar, modi sarkar” campaign became a buzz. People cracked jokes, made memes and what not. Narenda Modi used 3D holograms to have more reach towards crowd. However congress was not that keen on using new means of technology. Modi posted slefies to join the trend with young crowd.

News channels had a blast too, new tools of analytics and big data allowed them to represent new trends in new ways. They could make new co-relation and present the numbers in front of viewers in an intriguing way. It was continent for people to follow the trend because in last 5 years number of smartphones rose, internet services are very common now. So wherever they were, they can follow the news and trends. Apps and games were pretty hot too.

Internet on whole benefitted as well. Facebook implemented “I am a voter function”  to indicate which users voted from what area and help them gather more data about mood of election. Google had launched their election hub where you can track updates, news, search for candidates. It was a big step to in Indian Internet space as more than Facebook and Twitter people are tend to use Google more. Twitter was not behind. Besides having dedicated hastags and push notifications on the counting day. They implemented  “Tweet To Remember”  feature to include the voting day in your mobile calender and give you a reminder.

Sad part of the election was that number of people voted. There was laziness somewhere, but there was a reason too. Due to work opportunities and migrations to other states, people are often not in their constituencies. Since government has handled passport project well on major parts they should have an online mechanism to give a right to vote to people who are not present at the time of the voting. And now that aadhar card project is in place there should be booths to vote for your area from anywhere showing your aadhar card.

Another part that would be interesting to implement is vote count should be done with technology. Each EVM can have a separate database, and the results are directly submitted to central servers. And on counting day the results can be declared instantaneously. Also there should be more information available on candidates. Internet had information of metro cities but small towns and villages were ignored. Since in coming elections we would have more netizens, they would expect to have more information on their fingertips.

Come 2019 and who knows, we would be watching updates on our Google glasses and getting notification on our smart watches, while we have just voted with the finger scanner on our smartphone. Technology can fly miles in short times.

Twedding

@He joined twitter. @She also joined twitter.  @She took a picture, photoshopped it and put it as her DP. She was already a twitter celebrity. Thousands of followers . Numerous stalkers, and new trolls everyday.

@He was ugly, he used a cartoon character as his DP . He was #ForeverAlone, watched porn and tried to impress girls with witty lines.

@ He fell in love with her DP, Her tweets hardly matted. He knew he was smart. He knew how to Google good jokes and quotes.
@He followed @She. Witty comments, comforting words followed. @She followed back. @He tweeted what @She liked. Tweet conversations converted into DMs.

They  chatted, and fell in love. And then they decided to marry ON twitter. They hired @Priest for their wedding.

There was a lot of buzz around the twitter. The TL looked like a mess.

@troll1: Her DP is fake, I photoshopped it (This is a sly tweet)

@troll2: Heh! All the witty lines he uses are from Google and Russell Peters’ videos.

@Friend1: And those who can’t resist from making jokes can use #ShitPeopleSayInWedding hashtag.

@Friend2: OMG! OMG it’s @She‘s twedding. Best of luck sweetie. :*. XOXOXOXO.

@Friend3:  I will also hold quiz on #weddingQuiz. Winner would get free goodies. Please RT

@Friend 4 : Just before the wedding we will have #WeddingSongsMarathon. And we will play random songs in it. Yo Yo Honey Singh!

@Stalker1: Ah! She is getting married. Sapna tuta hai to dil kabhi jalta hai, Haan thoda dard hua par chalta hai.

@Stalker2: I will love you till the end of my account.

@He: Yay! Finally I am going to get laid. (This tweet was later found in his Drafts)

@twitterCeleb: I don’t take part in tweddings and shit. I always tweets sense. Get my tweets RTed and act pricy.

@SagrikaGhose: Congratulations to the couple. I hope they have a good rakshabandhan.

@kamaalrkhan: Good morning and kiss to @He and @She for having their wedding. I am cooking dal tadka and firni in wedding.

And finally the #wedding took place. Thousands of people live tweeted it. And as always made lame comments.

@Priest: Welcome tweeple to the #wedding. We are here to witness twedding of two handles.

@Priest: These two poor souls have fallen prey to the social networking. May Aakar Patel bless them

            @Priest: Now we will have ceremony. Any troll or stalker want to sly tweet?

@Priest : @She do you promise that you shall follow him, RT him, favorite him, DM him till you stop tweeting?

@She: @Preist I do.

@Priest: And @He do you promise to stalk her, troll her, say “Nice DP” on every DP she changed and #FF her every friday?

@He: @Prist I do.

@Priest: Now you may twiss.

@She: :*

@He: :*

But this is twitter and there is never a happy ending.@He sent her his real pictures. And @She called him to let him hear her ‘sweet’ voice.  The dreams got shattered. They fought, swore and blocked each other.

You don’t need fair and lovely to look pretty. A photo editing software does the job just as well. 😀

App Updates of the week

Last week there were a lot of app updates teased and rolled out across the platforms. I am will try and give comprehensive summary of these.

Facebook Messenger

After rolling out the beta testing program two weeks ago, the messenger has shown a lot of promising features over 3-4 updates. One of the major updates were that Free Calling was enabled for Indian user so they can call their contacts through the messenger. They are following the likes of Line and We chat to attract more users from across the globe.

 

Groups in messenger

There were design changes as well. The flat UI which rolled out in Instagram and had good reviews generally from the user is showing glimpse in the app as well. In the latest update they have added a Group Tab, where you can pin your group, create and delete them according to your will. This they have taken a leaf from whatsapp and bettered it by categorizing the groups.

Twitter

Twitter design team is on a roll. They gave out glimpse of a lot of features and got rid of some quickly too. Back this week they had a favorite people tab after home tab.       There you can add your favorite people and create a partly custom timeline of people you want to “Stalk” more. This is removed in the latest alpha release. But this can be a handy feature.

Twitter tagging people

In other small update twitter now displays view count of a particular tweet. This count is I think RT+Fav+click view count. The much hyped no mention style replying was removed this week after much bashing of the news. In a new feature now you can tag people in the pictures. This Facebook styled option was teased in the latest alpha version. When you tag the handles they get the notification but others don’t get to see the tagged handles.

Chrome

In chrome for Android, bandwidth management was tweaked a bit to allow more settings options. They have smoothed the tab switched and the animation is more fluid. Apart from that the loading and broken link bugs are fixed in the latest release.

Other Apps

• Facebook for Android updated with new design and added data counting app Onovo to have a data cap of your device.
• HTC said in their M8 launch event that the famous HTC Blinkfeed app, will be available for all the android devices. The app was listed in the webstore but it is still showing incompatible with other devices.
• Google Search got song recognition update in the voice search. However this has rolled out to limited amount of users.
• LastPass –  The single sign on password keeper app now allows saving passwords for services and websites in Chrome and other app.

These were some noticeable updates of this week. Tell us your views on these updates and what are you expecting in the future from other apps as well.

 

My Tryst with Networks

Now that I have avoided the obvious pun of Network-Notwork, let me start. So I had a problem with my laptop connecting to the net. I don’t know what the “Problem” is, but I know most of the symptoms/effects of that problem, which I will list out ahead (Yes, this a blatant attempt to get free tech support).

So I’l cut to the chase. Let me introduce the characters of this story:

1. A Dell Laptop, Windows 7 (Under warranty, accidental damage warranty to be precise (we’ll come back to this point in a post in the future. Promise)
2. A small office, which I partly own and run, running on a LAN. And since I am the most IT aware guy, by default, its IT go-to guy
3. My Office ISP, a TATA-VSNL joint venture something although Bills have DOCOMO on them
4. My Home Wifi, ISP: BSNL (special emphasis on BS)
5. My PC vendor’s IT support Guy Javed (sometimes he  find solutions by googling infront of me)
6. Me, self proclaimed IT head (Almost always I find solution by googling them)
7. Dell Service Guy in their call centre

So we start in the office. All is well. I am connected to LAN and Net, with the “Auto IP Config” and “Auto DNS Address” options. All is well.

One fine day, I decide to get my LAN cable re-crimped. Just t avoid an outage on an important day. So Javed comes, crimps, goes. This was near the end of the day.

Next day I skip to office with my laptop, and connect my LAN cable. And BOOM. Network access is fine, but I cant seem to connect to the net. Nobody else has this problem. Even if I connect from a different LAN cable point, same problem (Point to be noted)

The only way I figure out, is to manually feed in my IP address and DNS Servers. So I do that, and bang I am back on the net. Some would say problem solved, but No. Now, Twitter wont load images. Most images. Especially some new image. Not from Chrome, not from Firefox, not from Opera. Nada.

So In my opinion, both the above are symptoms, not being able to connect, and then images not loading, not the problem. So I call up Dell guy. Free service no. 30 odd mins we talk, we do all sorts of IP Reset, IP Renew, DNS Flush, Check some DNS settings. Check in safe mode. The works. Most of these commands threw some or the other error. Dell fellow gives up and says it’s a Network issue, check your router. LOL.

In the above process, in CMD, I notice that my Laptop’s IP is something 169.254….. Dell guy says that isn’t normal. And googling tells me ita almost evil to have an IP with this range, as opposed to the standard IP on LANs i.e. 192.168 something. So for some days all my efforts are at getting rid of this IP.

I head to twitter and also to Ivan Mehta. Nothing really helps. So as any well trained IT guy would do, I reinstall Windows. Same issue persists. Crie is coming now. In a final plea, I ask Twitter again for a solution. Somebody says try Google Public DNS. Again, like every seasoned Twitter guy, I favourite the tweet and proceed to forget about it.

Meanwhile, I als discover somehow, that If I use FlushDns in CMD, then Twitter will load images for me without an issue. Of course this is for a short time, say 30mins to an hour. So I am reduced to having the CMD window open for ever, Flushing my DNS every 10 mins. More crie.

Cut to home Wifi. I don’t know if this is a related issue but since I have the space to rant, I will. So I decide to update my Sony Phone’s software, via the PC companion software. I try it at night once, I get an error saying “Cant connect to Update server”. Obviously I assume, its past working hours, so server must be closed. Cool. Next day I try it in the afternoon. Again same. So I think, maybe the Xperia site, has the update file ready and I can download from there. So I proceed to www.sonymobile.com/in/. Site fails to load. The Sony fanboy in me refuses to accept that the site is down. So I try to access it via blockedsiteaccess.com/. BOOM I am on the site.

So now my Sherlock-level brain deciphers that somehow, this site is blocked on my Router or whatever thing-a-majik there is. (Later I realize that’s what my sister was shouting about for so many days when she was saying she cant update her Sony phone too and when I was dissing her as a Tech Noob. Anyways.)

Not knowing what to do, I think of going through the Twitter solutions I have in my favourites. I glance on the Google Public DNS option. Without much hope, I use this DNS setting and BOOM, I can now access Sony’s site, and I can also update my software. Much Amaze indeed.Excited, I try the same settings for my Office LAN and BOOM, Images load.

So Google Public DNS became my Vicks vaporub which cured my diverse symptoms. But I still don’t know:

1. Why all of a sudden my Office LAN acted up.
2. Why Sony’s site was blocked on my home WiFi
3. Why we eat Chlormint.

Ok Question 3 is too complicated, but Question 1 and 2 surely must have a logical explanation. And that’s the purpose of this post, as I mentioned earlier, to get free tech support. So feel free to throw your answers. Correct answer will get an all expenses  paid, 2 weeks, trip to USA (ex-Ukraine, i.e. flight will take you from Ukraine, you have to manage to reach there at own cost).

Meanwhile I am going to collect my framed picture of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, who have not only made so many amazing devices and apps and services, but managed to keep most of them free, so that I can do their Puja on a daily basis. Jai Google!

Meet The App: Jelly – The Fun Q and A

There is Quora and there is ask.fm. Put them in a mixer, grind them add some good spices and you’ll have an amazing app called Jelly. Jelly is an Q-A platform founded by one of the twitter co-owners Biz Stone.
Unique thing about Jelly is you have to post a picture to ask a question and the character limit in the answer. You can annotate or point out the question in the form of MS paint like brush on the picture. You can sign up by Twitter of Facebook account.

Ask Question

Here you can see your activities.

And you also get notification if any of your Facebook friend or someone you follow on twitter answers the question.

Overall interface is card based. You can swipe through the cards in the form of answers and questions. If you like an answer you can give a “Good” to that answer and if you want to thank that person you can give a “Thank You Card”. If you want to answer a question or see the answers of that question later you can save the card by Starring it. You can swipe down to see the new question.

Question Screen

Jelly Answer Screen

There is no reply to Answer function yet, nor you can post without photos. Also there are no taxonomy or searching function of questions. But USP of this platform can be the limit of letters in answering. One can expect a short precise answer rather than an essay like every 3rd answer on Quora.

This can be a great engagement tool for Brands and Businesses. Who would not like quick customer feedback on the thing. They could even hold contests on naming a particular product. As the app is in beta version there is lot we can expect from them. Just Jelly till then.

The Team

Biz Stone : The founder of twitter who though the idea of this snippy app.

Ben Finkel: A buddy of Biz Stone’s who worked at MIT.

Austin Sammers: Designer of Award winning iOS app Push Pop Press

Kevin Thau: The brain behind all things mobile on Twitter.