We had a few bugs (Opportunities)  on samepoint.com today.  

Opportunity 1:  The Footer Gone Wild.

The footer was broke for about five minutes.  Since I too am a heavy user, I noticed the problem immediately and fixed it. Let’s just say, there are too many CSS got-U’s  in the world.  

Opportunity 2:  Images with no meaning.

We had a user try our image search today and noticed that the images could not be clicked on.  When the user clicked the hyperlink, the clickthru did not go to the website.  It went to the image file, not giving any context what the image was used for.  That of course was a big problem and we fixed that too.

Opportunity 3: RSS for all sections

Now that we changed the interface of the site and added many more sections and opportunities for people to categorize social media, we are now faced with a very interesting opportunity. We are missing some feeds. We are now in the process of adding RSS feeds for all sections.  At the moment, we are only providing RSS feeds for conversations.  In the near future all categories will work.  If you have a special case where you need the feed to work for your website, e-mail us from our contact page and we’ll get back to you quickly.

Warm and fussy moment …

I’m consistently reminded how important social media is to a business and it’s customers.  These 3 opportunities that were found today only came to us from our users emailing and sending us direct messages on Twitter.  Thank you all for your contributions today and tomorrow we will conquer bigger things.

We have made many changes to our website.  The most obvious change is the way the search results render.  We’ve taken a bold step in trying to organize the social media landscape as we know it today.  Samepoint is now categorizing many different types of social networking or social media site’s content.

We’ve added a new feature called “related searches” that is ingrained inside of the search results.  These are targeting keywords that are inside of the documents that are pulled back.  This allows you to quickly scan what’s inside of a link before going there.

We have designed a search engine to be fast and simple.  That is the reason why we have sentiment analysis also ingrained in the search results.  When we say “fast” we don’t mean how fast the page draws.  When we say fast, we mean how fast can you scan through the result and make decisions on what you need to click on to visit.

After taking well-deserved criticism on our presentation layer, we hope that this interface helps our users look through social media a little better.  We are always reaching to make our search engine better and are looking to our users to help us create interfaces that work the best for them.

More here 

http://dsocialweb.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/cool-search-engines-vs-google

I am glad I have been in this business for such a long time. I have learned not to take things personally. For a startup with no VC backing as of yet, and still in the radar of the big guns like Mashable, we are holding our own.

There was yet another mention of samepoint in this post: http://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-tools/

A loyal user said this :

“Great list, Dan! You never fail to disappoint! Along the lines of Social Search (I’ve heard of Serph, not Social Mention or Keotag) is another I was tweeted about yesterday: http://www.samepoint.com”

Dan said:

“@ Ari - I tried that one and it doesn’t work well. There is no organization with the results if you input your name. See for yourself. Thanks for the comment.”

Then Dan said

”

One day after Mashabe did a spontaneous review of Samepoint.com, I decided to see what the effect was overall. Here is what I found.

1) Approx 10 more entries in Bloglines

2) 1 new entry in blogsearch.google.com ( Weird since there were multiple blogs that wrote about us) Next test: Test Google Blog Search.

3) Approx 10-15 Different Site write ups ( Thank you)

4) 4 Extra folks following us on twitter. (And we are now following you.)

5) 15% Traffic Spike

6) Some cool kudos on twitter. ( Thank you)

7) Some cool folks marking us in delicious. ( Thank you)

Quite a few Google alerts following “Samepoint.com”

Now, this is most appreciated. Just think if we received a very favorable review? I think Mashable does have a positive effect on a new web site’s presence. I would suggest however, try not to get on their radar too early. We did, and took some good criticism on our UI, which the front end peeps are diligently fixing as I type.

I don’t know about you, but to have Mashabe to do a Usability test in or Beta stage is gold to us. We thank them for the once over. Back to the lab we go. I hope that they find it in their big hearts to look at us again in the near future.

And to think, it all started from a tweet showing how many Social Mentions we had in our index of Mashable.

Stay Tuned .. More to Come.

So, we were mentioned in Mashable.

–

If you’re a brand on the web, it’s vital to track what people are saying about your company. As a result, “conversational search” has become a hot topic: how do you track those mentions across the web, in real time?

Newcomer SamePoint aims to do just that, although the technology seems far too green. Aggregating results from social networks, Twitter and blogs, it also aims to track positive and negative discussion about a topic by identifying words which are likely to be complimentary, and those that are critical.

The results, however, are mixed: a search for Mashable return scores of spammy Hi5 groups. You can grab an RSS feed for the search, of course, but there’s no RSS icon: you’ll need to either use a browser with auto-discovery of RSS feeds, or click the RSS Feeds link and re-enter your search.

In short: a scrappy implementation of a concept that will nonetheless be big in 2009.

Full article here

–

Well this is just a pleasure to be mentioned in Mashable. I guess our Beta badge says it all. We are going to work hard to make the interface better for our hard core users.

Thanks mashable for the mention and we will clean up the scrappy.

We have seen all the websites that has the thumbs up and a thumbs down in order to let us know if a comment is positive or negative. This is great for looking through thousands of comments or web pages. The only problem I see with this is that every website has its own algorithm of choosing what comment or web page is either positive or negative. It is quite possible to read a comment on one website and it would be marked negative then somewhere else it could possibly be marked positive. There has to be a better way to determine if a comment is either positive or negative.

Samepoint.com has taken an organic approach. We let users decide by clearly showing them the words that we have identified to be either positive or negative. Comments on our site aren’t marked either positive or negative. When you go to the search results you are able to determine based on the green for positive or red negative words. You still get the benefit of quickly skimming through many comments to see which one has the lion share of positive or negative words. Samepoint.com does not assume that it knows what you believe or think is either positive or negative.

Every industry is different. Every motivation is different. Every person is different. Samepoint.com leaves it up to you to decide whether to take action on the sentiment of a comment.

I just recently read an article in Savoy Professional Magazine that talked about a career builder survey. The very interesting thing about this article was that employers are now using social media to figure out what candidates are doing online. With so many layoffs going on right now there are a large amount of people who are looking for jobs that did not expect to look for jobs. http://www.samepoint.com/?q=layoffs

Candidates may not be prepared for employers looking on what is on their facebook, myspace, blogs or even there twitter statuses.

After reading this article, it further justified the reason why Samepoint.com exist. When we began indexing conversations eight months ago it became clear that no other site at the time was pulling this kind of information back to help us monitor the chatter amongst our clients. Correction. There were no free options. We did not want alerts about web pages or blog post we won at the actual comments so we had to begin doing that ourselves. We felt the Internet needed a free tool in order to look through all of the different social media sites that were out there.

I suggest if you have a username that if you are very prolific in using social media takes a look on samepoint.com and see if your name exists. Look to see where you have left trails of your consciousness on the Internet. You do have an opportunity to make changes or make your profiles private.

Employers are now paying attention and what you say can be used against you.

Most CMOs I’ve spoken to recently have hinted at a decrease in their overall marketing budget.  Many are looking to social media as a more cost-effective means of building brand, driving traffic and delivering a strong bang for the buck.  But, most don’t know where to begin.  That’s the social media quandry - where to begin the conversation…

I always advise friends, relatives and clients that the first step in social media is listening.  You need to monitor the noise to find the buzz.  That’s what Samepoint is all about, finding out what people are saying about your brand, product, company or self.

After you find the conversations that relate to you, become part of that discussion.  Once you’re making your opinions known, you’ll see how the world of Social Media opens up new avenues of conversations, as well as new relationships and insights.

Social media can offer an extremely cost-efficient marketing channel.  There is no cost to making a comment, or emailing an influential blogger, or writing a post yourself.  The only expense is that of your time.  So, listen to what’s being said and get involved in the conversation.  Since most marketers are cutting back on their ad dollars, they’ll have plenty of time to tap into social media.  Once you start, the return on investment will become evident.

We had a request to put this feature in.  Twitter user, http://twitter.com/chrisamichaels asked for this.  We decided that it was a great request, so we just did it.  Enjoy and thank you Chris for your insight.

Samepoint.com utilizes it’s unique technology to bring conversations together from multiple sources to one defined point.