Mailbeans

An interesting site that we came across recently is Mailbeans.com, a web based email aggregator.   The email aggregation space is interesting and already includes sites such as zenbe, orgoo, fuser and topicr.  Most of these other sites have already included calendars, Facebook and Twitter integration for example.  Carving out a niche in this space will not be easy.

Overview of the site
After you sign in you are shown a control panel styled layout.  The left side of the control panel has a link to your global inbox where your email is aggregated.   Also on the left is where you have your settings so you can make all the necessary configurations.  On the right side of the page is a listing of your individual email accounts, your frequent contacts, files and tags that you have used for your email.   The global inbox is a standard view that is not much different then most web based email and has the standard functionality.   I did find the user interface to be pretty simple and easy to use for the most part.  The one thing that I had an issue with when testing it out is that I had trouble navigating back to the main control panel after I clicked on one of the individual email boxes.  After a few minutes of working with the application I was able to figure it out.  The site is designed to have more of an application based experience then a web site.

One of the nice features I like about the site is the information you get when you click on a frequent contact.  When you click on a frequent contact in the main panel it gives you details such as the hourly distribution of received mail, the mail count and a graph on what is read/unread.  I think if this is expanded to more reporting and includes all emails and email accounts it would be beneficial.

Thoughts
I think this site has a lot of potential and you have to remind yourself that it is in beta.  The site will really need to add in features and integrate with other services to become more of a communication platform for it to get ahead of the other available sites.  Staying as it is as an email aggregation tool may not be enough.  It will be interesting to see where this site is in a few months and what they have planned.

Competitor Sites
Zenbe, Orgoo, Fuser, Google Wave and Topicr

Screenshots

RockDex

A music site that recently caught our eye is RockDex.com, a site that will give you the overall buzz surrounding your band.  RockDex is similar to Socialmention that we previewed a few days ago, it goes out and searches various social networks, blogs and music sites to come up with a score that tells you what the buzz is on your band.

Talking with the team at RockDex they tell us they have had 5,000 artists run their RockDex scores by hand and they have collected another 225,000 scores.    The site has dozens of resources and searches thousands of blogs.

Figuring our your site’s RockDex score is as simple as entering your band’s name in the textbox on the home page.   Once you start the search RockDex will search various social networks, blogs, micro-blogs and music sites to aggregate your RockDex score.   The RockDex score is broken down in to 4 categories:

Social Buzz, which is calculated by twitter and blip.fm posts about your band, how many blogs mention your band and other sources.
Social Media is based on an artists presence on YouTube, Flickr and other similar sites.
Fans, this score is determined by looking at data from Last.FM, Eventful, iLike and other similar sites.
Listens score is generated by looking at MySpace and Last.fm.  They factor changes in your weekly listens if there is previous data about your band.

RockDex also has a chart listing.   The top artists are the ones that have the greatest RockDex score.  The ATP-Breeders chart are the artists that are ranked by the amount of buzz playing All Tomorrow’s Parties hosted by the Breeders.  The rising artist chart lists the artists that are moving up the RockDex index that fastest.  It does this by comparing their current RockDex score against their previous score.

One interesting feature is the ability to use the SoundCloud Dropbox.  This feature allows the band to upload their songs and then the team at RockDex will listen to it and message them back.  They have found some bands this way.

One of the things I was concerned about is gaming the system.  This is one of the downsides to these type of sites and will pretty much make them unreliable.  Talking with the team they said that they have fine tuned their algorithm to prevent this by weighting certain parts of the score and looking at the influence of certain sources.

RockDex is privately funded and in it’s startup phase.  They have a few partnerships in place already.   The future for RockDex is looking good.   They are planning on adding more depth and analysis to the site.  This should help get a more detailed and thourough report to the users.   This is definitely a site to watch and if you are a band a great way to see how well you are progressing in getting a good buzz going for your band.

socialmention.com

Ever wonder what someone is saying about your brand?   With socialmention.com it is easier then ever to find out.  This site allows you to search hundreds of sources to gather information such as sentiment, strength, passion and reach to get a complete report of the buzz on your brand.  It also fills a need for something that I see quite often and that is how do you measure your social media campaign.  Often we want to know is the time and effort that we are devoting to social media paying off?  This site is a great starting point and overview to get those answers.

The Socialmention site has a very simple user interface.   The home page shows a text box in the center of the page.  Above the text box are links in case you wish to filter your search.  After entering your search item, Socialmention will then go out to its sources and fetch your results.  Some of the search options you can use to streamline your search are microblogs, bookmarks, comments, video or audio for example.  One thing we did notice is that the more well known your subject is the longer it will take to search.  Searching for Ford Motor Company will take longer then searching for the mom and pop grocery store around the corner.  Which makes sense as there is much more information to be found.  Still, the time it takes to do a search is resonably fast.

After searching all the selected sources, your results are displayed on a very nice dashboard.  In the upper left corner you are shown the strength, the sentiment, the passion and the reach of your subject.  Strength relates to the probability that your brand is being discussed in social media.  The sentiment ratio is the ratio of positive to negative comments that people are having.   The next rating, Passion is the percentage of the probability that people are talking repeatedly about your brand.  Finally reach is a measurement of the range of influence on your brand.  Also included for you is the average mentions.  Mentions are displayed as per minute or per month depending upon your results.  The data will also include when the last mention was and how many unique authors have discussed the brand.

Following this data is the sentiment broken down by total number of positive, neutral and negative mentions.   I found sentiment to be very interesting.   I can see that it would not be easy to determine a positive or negative mention.  However, talking with the team at Socialmention they told us that their algorithm has an 80% success rate.   A positive or negative mention is found based on looking at patterns during the search.  Sentiment, however is more of an overall gauge to determine if there are more people talking positively or negatively about the brand.  Also included is the top keywords, top users and sources.  Top users is helpful when you want to find out who is talking about your brand the most.  In the main section of the page is the mentions that were found on the brand and more detailed information such as a link to the source, the headline, who it was who talked about it and how long ago.

A few other features that the site has are email alerts, RSS Feeds and an output to a CSV/Excel file.  The CSV/Excel file option is very handy.  Downloading and then importing the CSV file to a Google spreadsheet is quick and painless.

If you want to make it even easier to search you can install a search plugin.  This will allow you to search Socialmention right from your browser.  I set it up in my Firefox browser very quickly and was able to search without any problems.

Socialmention also has an API for developers.  The API allows you to return the number of items and also each mention individually.   Currently the rate limiting is set to no more then 1000 queries per day.  If you plan to use the API for a commercial application they ask that you to contact them.

Currenty the site is moving from a project phase to a business phase and future enhancements of the site could potentially include reporting, saved searches and more analysis of the data.

This site has a lot of potential and could fill a need for marketers who are helping customers with their brand on the internet.  I’d love to have the ability to see reporting where you can track statistics over a time period.  It would be interesting to see the growth or decline of your brand in short, intermediate and long term charts.   You could integrate it with news to see how the web is reacting to certain events that affect your brand.  This is a valuable tool for anyone who needs to track the social space to keep tabs on what people are saying.    I know this is one I am going to be using for quite some time.

Thanks for taking the time to visit Technihub.  I wanted to let you know what we will be discussing on this site and also ask you as the reader what can we do for you?

First i’d like to tell you what we plan on discussing here on this site.  For one, I plan to focus on social media.  I find the way people and businesses are leveraging the internet and the tools available to them very interesting.  I plan to share information from other social media sites and talk to the stakeholders in this space.

Next, I plan to focus on social networking.  From news on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and more, I plan on helping you with news and information from social networks.  Also, I plan to review and discuss interesting tools such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop and other tools that will make you more productive.

Finally, I plan to focus on startups.  We will review them, get you information about these companies and talk with the people that are behind what could be the next big thing.

If you have anything that you would like to share with us, news, events, your startup, feel free to contact us.

Here is to hopefully many years of fun, knowledge sharing and meeting new people.

Mike Riley