Expert Labs is winding down, but our work on ThinkUp is just beginning. One initial avenue of funding for the new ThinkUp company is via the Knight Foundation's News Challenge, a prestigious, international media contest which awards grants to its winners. Our News Challenge application lays out details of our plans. If you've got a Tumblr account, please like (and even reblog!) our application to increase our chances. Just click on the heart next to the post. Thanks in advance for your help. Continue reading

A new release of ThinkUp, version 1.0.4, is now available for download. Download it now and upgrade your installation. In addition to containing over a dozen bugfixes, version 1.0.4 replaces ThinkUp's flat, image-based charts with interactive JavaScript charts which display information more clearly and offer more details when you roll over bars, lines, and pie chart slices. See the new charts in action on my ThinkUp installation's dashboard. Version 1.0.4 also contains a brand new web-based upgrader. In other words, this could be your last manual ThinkUp upgrade where you have to FTP files to and fro. From here on... Continue reading

What a week. The news that ThinkUp 1.0 is here inspired an incredible response. We wanted to share some highlights with the community: ReadWriteWeb calls ThinkUp "the social media management tool that matters most" in an effusive review. CNET summarizes ThinkUp's availability with "this is a big deal." Betabeat says that ThinkUp is "not just a convenient way to grab all your data. It’s taking a stand against those who use your data for financial gain." Gigaom writer (and ThinkUp beta tester!) Matthew Ingram emphasizes that the app "makes it easy to see patterns or to analyze the effectiveness of... Continue reading

This month's ThinkUp Talk episode covered features in the new beta 16 release, the ThinkUp 2.0 redesign, ThinkUp usage statistics, and Expert Labs' new multi-agency data capture initiative. Listen to the recording here: Thinkup Talk #10 October 2011 by Thinkup Thanks so much to Randy for hosting and editing the episode, and to everyone who called in and chatted with us in IRC. The next episode will be November 9, the second Wednesday of next month, and here's how to participate live. Continue reading

Over the past year, through 8 alpha and 15 beta releases, ThinkUp has evolved into a rich platform that captures and analyzes data from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. All this time, the developer community has been more focused on ThinkUp's internal engine than its user-facing look and feel. ThinkUp's current design, generously created by Bill F. at Dash30 in his free time, came together in a piecemeal fashion, bit by bit, as new functionality emerged. So far, we haven't taken a comprehensive, user-focused approach to designing ThinkUp's application interface and design. That's about to change. For the past 7 months,... Continue reading

Thanks to everyone who participated in this month's ThinkUp podcast episode, where we covered application security, database migrations, Facebook plugin enhancements, and plans for new features in the future. Listen to the recording here: Thinkup Talk #9 by Thinkup As always, we're so grateful to Randy for hosting and editing the episode, and to everyone who chimed in either via Skype or in IRC. The next episode will be October 12, the second Wednesday of next month, and here's how to participate live. Continue reading

In this month's episode of the ThinkUp Talk podcast, we discussed Sam and Aaron's summer mentorship, Andy's recent White House data analysis, the beta 14 release and the status of our "run to one", and holding ThinkUp office hours and video tutorials in Google+. Thinkup Talk #8 August 2011 by Thinkup Thanks to million to Randy for hosting and editing the episode, and Andy, Sam, and Aaron for hopping onto the call, and everyone who chimed in on IRC. The next episode will be September 14, the second Wednesday of next month, and here's how to participate live. Continue reading

Thanks a million to the folks at Tekzilla for chatting with me about ThinkUp and developing open source in their latest episode. Watch it here: Continue reading

In this month's episode of ThinkUp Talk, Randy, Trevor, Sam, Lisa, and Phil discuss myThinkUp, community mentoring, culture shock for open source newcomers, documentation, and making the ThinkUp code base easier for new developers to understand and get start working on. Give it a listen. Thinkup Talk #5 May 2011 by Thinkup Thanks again to Randulo for setting up and hosting the podcast. We'll be back on the second Wednesday of June with a new episode; here's more on how to participate live. Continue reading

Expert Labs had five glorious days working together in New York City and Washington, DC last week. We met with agencies, defined our roadmap for the coming months, and took a couple of fun field trips, too. Incredibly, it was the first time the four of us worked together in the same physical room. On Monday, Andy and I got to collaboratively hack on ThinkUp at Tipping Point Partners in lower Manhattan. Working at the same table makes it easy to get things done: that afternoon, Andy put the final touches on ThinkBack, the first visualization which uses ThinkUp's new... Continue reading

If you live in the San Francisco area or you're attending Google I/O, I'll be hosting a ThinkUp community meetup on Tuesday evening. Please join us: When: Tuesday, May 10th, at 7pm PT Where: The Thirsty Bear (within walking distance of the Moscone Center) It's always a blast to get out from behind the keyboard and get to know community members face to face. Even if you're just interested in learning more about the project, do join us--all are welcome. Hope to see you there! Continue reading

Expert Labs is very pleased to crown the winner of our first-ever ThinkUp bounty, an iPad 2: Sam Rose, for his work building the ThinkUp Post JSON API. Congratulations, Sam! Sam did a fantastic job building the first iteration of ThinkUp's API, which exposes posts, replies, retweets, and tweet entities as JSON for developers to easily build cool mashups and visualizations without having to dig into the ThinkUp PHP or database. You can see how the API works in the Post API documentation. Speaking of, what most impressed me about this work is how thoroughly tested and documented it is.... Continue reading

In this month's installment of ThinkUp Talks, the ThinkUp community chatted about CodeConf, the iPad 2 bounty, the mentor program, beta 10 and our upcoming 1.0 release, Sam's new post API work, GitHub's issue tracker upgrade, and project documentation. If you weren't able to call in live, click on the play button below to listen to the whole episode or skip the sections you're most interested in. Thinkup App Talks, April Edition by Thinkup Thanks again to Randulo for setting up and hosting the podcast. We'll be back on the second Wednesday of May with a new episode; here's more... Continue reading

Had a blast this weekend at GitHub's inaugural conference, CodeConf, where I got to give a new talk on building community around open source software based on my experience at Expert Labs running ThinkUp. CodeConf didn't record audio or video of any of the talks, so I'm posting a transcript of mine here. Enjoy. I used to think that the process of making open source software went like this: you write software, you apply your open source license of choice to it, and you publish the source. Ta-da. Open source. But if you're building something you want people to use... Continue reading

Contributor Randulo organized and hosted our third live conference call for the ThinkUp community today, where we discussed ThinkUp's 1.0 release roadmap, Twitter realtime support, Google Summer of Code 2011, and announced our iPad 2 bounty. If you missed the live call-in show, you can listen to the MP3 embedded below, which includes Randulo, Andy Baio, me, and ThinkUp committers Amy, Sam and others. Thinkup #3 March 9th, 2011 by Thinkup Thanks again to Randulo for being such a gracious host, and helping the ThinkUp community hear each other's voices over continents and through time zones. The ThinkUp community plans... Continue reading

What are you doing in the next 4-6 weeks? Here's an idea: Get a wow-worthy contribution accepted into ThinkUp and earn yourself a brand new iPad 2 and "I made a great open source project better" bragging rights. Expert Labs is offering an iPad 2 bounty (16GB, Wi-Fi only) to a community member who makes a significant contribution in the next month and a half. Working our way toward ThinkUp's 1.0 release, Expert Labs wants to give contributors a little extra motivation to fix that bug, build that feature, or write that documentation they've been pondering. Apple's new iPad 2... Continue reading

Going to Austin this year for SXSW Interactive? We're doing our second SXSW meetup and we'd love you to see you there. Our Doodle poll tells us Saturday at 5pm is the best timeslot. Here are the details: What: ThinkUp community meetup When: Saturday, March 12 at 5pm Where: The Ginger Man, 301 Lavaca St. Andy and I will be there, and we're excited to get out from behind our keyboards and meet the people who help power ThinkUp face to face. We'll be at the long tables in the back patio of The Ginger Man, as weather permits. Even... Continue reading

One year ago today, ThinkUp's first official release, alpha 1, quietly became available. I'd been building the app mostly solo during my spare time since August of 2009, but when Expert Labs took on the project in February of 2010, we got serious about building community and releasing code. Here are a few representative numbers on how our first year went. In terms of ThinkUp's codebase, in the past year: The source code changed 664 times, an average of about 1.8 commits per day. 1 1,002 out of about 5,500 2 files in ThinkUp's codebase changed: specifically, there were 165,583... Continue reading

ThinkUp contributor Randulo organized and hosted a live conference call for ThinkUp developers and contributors yesterday, where we got to discuss ThinkUp development, security, plugins, screencasts, scalability and more. If you missed the live call-in show, listen to the MP3 embedded below, which includes Randulo, Andy Baio, me, and ThinkUp committers Sam and Randi. Thinkup Talks #2 January 12, 2010 by Thinkup Thanks to Randulo for organizing the the call. The ThinkUp community plans to do the conference call every second Wednesday of the month at 9am Pacific time. Hope you'll join us in February. Follow @thinkupapp on Twitter for... Continue reading

Expert Labs reached a major milestone today! We released the first beta of ThinkUp, the PHP/MySQL webapp that archives your social media interactions in a database you control. Download it here. Following eight alpha releases over the past eight months, I'm so proud that the ThinkUp community and the software product itself has reached beta. The beta represents hundreds of commits by over 20 thoughtful developers scattered across the globe, and countless conversations on the mailing list, in Wave, on Skype, IM, and on GitHub. It's amazing how far ThinkUp's come since its early days as a solo weekend project.... Continue reading

Lots of geeks like to spend some time on a three-day weekend doing fun, spare-time coding. If you've been curious about ThinkUp and have a little extra time this Labor Day weekend, come on down! ThinkUp's come a long way so it's easier than ever to dive in, try it out, and experiment. Here are four ways you can help make ThinkUp better, whether you've got a free 30 minutes or 3 hours this weekend: Test ThinkUp's new easy installer. Running git, wrangling MySQL scripts, and creating symlinks is no longer required to install ThinkUp. If you've got a web... Continue reading

Ekansh Preet, one of ThinkUp's Google Summer of Code students, delivered his completed summer project last week: a Google Maps visualization of ThinkUp post replies, and the ability to sort replies by proximity to the original post. To see Ekansh's work in action, check out the White House's Grand Challenge tweet replies mapped here and here. After such a successful summer contributing to the project, we asked Ekansh a few questions about his experience with GSoC and the ThinkUp community. Here's what he said. Q: Given all the projects that were available, what made you decide to work on ThinkUp... Continue reading