The corporate social web still sucks

No need to panic if you use ThinkUp to back up your social network life; the application will remain open source and freely available.

But Expert Labs is going away and ThinkUp is refocusing on a larger goal — liberating your online social life from the clutches of corporate web entities.

In its own words the new ThinkUp wants to build “an information network that connects to today’s social networks, but isn’t centralized and dependent on a company or investors.”

That’s not an entirely new idea. Diaspora and some other projects are trying to do the same thing, but ThinkUp is taking a different approach — it wants to build an app first and focus on the user experience rather than the underlying technology.

In fact ThinkUp already is an app that’s pretty close to what it’s aiming to do. ThinkUp is a web-based app that pulls your data out of social silos like Facebook or Twitter and stores it on your own server. You control your own data, and have a record of your conversations potentially long after Facebook, Twitter and the rest have become mere footnotes in the history of the web.

For more on how ThinkUp works and how you can use it be sure to check out our earlier coverage and then grab the code and try it for yourself.

So what of ThinkUp’s new, loftier goals? Is any attempt to replace Facebook doomed to failure? Of course not. Everything is replaceable, just ask MySpace. And ThinkUp believes its approach is different. “Prior attempts have tried to solve this problem based on the assumption that it is a technical challenge,” says ThinkUp’s Knight News Challenge application. “We believe it to be a social one.” ThinkUp’s focus going forward will be on the social and the interface:

We will draw people in through a compelling media site that encourages participation via our decentralized platform… a peer-to-peer network that powers a great media property with broad appeal — imagine if Digg or Reddit were open, decentralized and powered by a network instead of votes.

If you’re curious to know what that might look like, head on over to the ThinkUp proposal for the Knight News Challenge and click the heart icon to “like” it (incidentally if the Knight New Challenge sounds familiar, that might be because it’s also the birthplace of EveryBlock). In the meantime, work on the ThinkUp app continues with a new release that improves the charts and graphs and paves the way for the coming Foursquare support. Check out the ThinkUp GitHub page for more details.

If you’ve ever wanted to archive your social network activity, store in your own database and pull all sorts of interesting visualizations out of it, then the new ThinkUp app is what you’ve been waiting for.

ThinkUp is one part metrics app — tracking which of your posts are most popular, for example — and one part cross-network aggregator. It offers features you won’t find on Twitter or Facebook, like a detailed “conversation view” of exchanges with other users. ThinkUp also acts as a backup for your social network data, pulling it into your own database. It even offers CSV files for creating your own spreadsheets.

Since it archives all of your activity, ThinkUp is an especially useful tool for those of us who like to maintain control over our own data. It takes stuff that would otherwise only live in the various networks’ silos and copies it to a database where we’re the administrator. So if we want to ditch Twitter or Facebook in some distant future where those companies start acting against our best interests, we don’t lose the massive stores of updates, links, photos and, most importantly, friend relationships we’ve already set up. And in the meantime, it lets us have fun with all the data it’s archiving.

Although ThinkUp is still a beta release, we took the code for a spin and found it to be stable enough to be useful. At the moment, it only supports Twitter and Facebook data, but ThinkUp plans to add additional social networks in the future, including LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and Google Buzz. If you’d like to try out the limited beta, head over to Github and grab the code. You may notice it’s a project published by Gina Trapani, the former Lifehacker editor who is now an independent author, blogger and programmer.

Installing ThinkUp is a bit like installing WordPress on your own server — you’ll need a MySQL database, PHP 5 and a public URL (at least to start, Twitter’s new OAuth system requires a public callback). A full list of system requirements can be found on GitHub.

Once you’ve unzipped and uploaded the code, just visit the URL where you plan to use ThinkUp and an automated install script will walk you through the installation process, just like WordPress. The only snag we hit was that our server didn’t support PHP’s mail() function, so we never got a confirmation e-mail. The solution is pretty simple: just head into MySQL and mark your user as confirmed.

Once you’re up and running, ThinkUp is pretty simple to use. It wraps your myriad of data in a nice-looking interface. Some of the information ThinkUp gives you for Twitter is available in the new Twitter interface, but there’s plenty of extra stuff that make ThinkUp worth having.

ThinkUp's conversation view

The big feature here is that ThinkUp tracks all of your Twitter interactions, showing your most replied-to posts, your most re-tweeted posts and, my personal favorite, threaded conversations with other Twitter users. But it also tracks everything your followers do as well. For example, ThinkUp catalogs all the links and images your followers have posted, displaying them all in one place.

See all your follower's posted images in a single view

There are dozens of features, like charts and graphs showing post counts, follower counts and @replies over time. You can also view all of your followers or friends on a Google Map.

While ThinkUp puts a tremendous amount of data at your fingertips, it manages to keep the interface simple enough that it’s never overwhelming. In fact, it can offer some insight into both how you use Twitter and how you might get more out of it.

If you’ve ever wondered why some of you posts are more popular than others, ThinkUp offers a window on what your followers like, how they respond to your posts, and how quickly they respond. ThinkUp is especially useful if you often post questions of your followers. Because responses tend to trickle in over time, finding them all can be difficult given the speed of Twitter. Thanks to the conversation view, ThinkUp makes it easy to see your question and everyone’s response in a single view.

As should be apparent when you set it up, ThinkUp is an entirely modular app — everything is a plugin. That means anyone can write plugins and expand the functionality of ThinkUp. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be repository of outside plugins. But should the app take off, we expect something of the sort will be available.

ThinkUp is still clearly a beta release and a little rough around the edges. Its biggest downfall is a lack of user documentation. There is however, great documentation for developers looking to extend the app. But even at this early stage, ThinkUp is well on its way to becoming a must-have tool for social media addicts — albeit ones with access to a personal web server and the smarts to use it.

See Also:

• Take a Tour of the New Twitter
• Twitter Moves to OAuth: The OAuthcalypse Is Nigh
• Using the Twitter API