ThinkUp 1.0.1 is now available, the first update since the big 1.0 release. Here's how to update your installation. This release is packed with fixes and improvements which resolve many of the errors we've heard about on the mailing list, like resolving bugs with the search feature and "Undefined property" PHP notices. There's a new configuration feature in 1.0.1, too: administrators can set ThinkUp's writable data directory location in the config.inc.php file. This makes ThinkUp compatible in environments with stricter security rules like orchestra.io. To help spread the word, we also recently launched a few more goodies: Homepage redesign: Thanks... Continue reading

The White House loves Twitter, and Twitter loves the White House. How much? Last year, they grew their audience by over one-third, adding another 650,000+ followers to their 2M+ base. There are lots of views into engagement on Twitter, but we have the data to give a unique view into what it looks like from the @whitehouse perspective. We've tracked their activity for the last couple years using ThinkUp to analyze and publicly release large datasets. We decided it might be nice show how the White House engaged their audience last year — without resorting to cheap gimmicks like linkbait... Continue reading

We've been tracking the White House's social media presence in full detail using ThinkUp for more than a year, which lets us give you a unique look at how real people are responding to @whitehouse on Twitter during this evening's State of the Union speech. These charts and data points also compare this year's activity to last year's State of the Union, since we have the ThinkUp data set from 2011 as well. (Note: The White House added their @whlive account since the last State of the Union, and since they've split their activity between both accounts, we combine them... Continue reading

Last week, cloud hosting service PHP Fog announced that they were offering a free hosting tier for PHP apps, including native support for ThinkUp. I made a short screencast showing how easy it is to get up-and-running on PHP Fog. From signup to activating my ThinkUp account, it took about three minutes from start to finish. It skips most of the installation process, making this the quickest and easiest way for non-geeks to get started with ThinkUp. Let us know if you try it out! Continue reading

Last week, we announced the Federal Social Media Index, a dashboard tracking 125 federal government agencies and departments on Twitter. The results were inspiring, with some great media coverage and a flood of requests from agencies asking to get involved. This week, NASA takes the Top Agency spot on the FSMI, with 67 responses to the nine questions they asked of their staggering 1.6M followers, and a total 360 replies to their posts. Congrats! Media Reactions The FSMI launch received some nice coverage in the press. NextGov wrote a feature about the launch, pulling some insights and interesting tidbits out... Continue reading

Today, we're happy to announce the Federal Social Media Index, a living dashboard that measures the activity of 125 federal departments and agencies on Twitter. Powered by ThinkUp, it's updated weekly without human intervention or editorial review, an unbiased look at how well agencies are engaging their followers. While it's obvious the federal government's embraced social media on Twitter and Facebook, each organization uses them in different ways and it's tricky to tell who's doing it well. Some use it for press releases alone, while others are soliciting opinions from the public and replying constantly. Our hope is that the... Continue reading

After 8 alphas, 17 betas, and 1,342 commits by over 60 contributors over the past 20 months, we're thrilled to announce that ThinkUp is now out of beta. Download ThinkUp 1.0 here. For everyone hearing about it for the first time, ThinkUp is the first free app that lets you to archive your Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ activity, a powerful open-source tool for analyzing and searching through the activity of your social networks. Thanks to the hard work of our dedicated, rapidly-expanding development community, we're thrilled to announce this new milestone. A sample of ThinkUp's features: Archive your Twitter, Facebook,... Continue reading

ThinkUp beta 17 is out! Download it now or install it in 60 seconds on Amazon EC2 using the ThinkUp Launcher beta. Here's how to upgrade your existing installation to beta 17. ThinkUp is easier to use and better-looking than it's ever been. As of this release, ThinkUp's interface has been completely redesigned from the ground up, in an adaptation of Mule Design's 2.0 design for our 1.0 interface. You can see what the redesign looks like in action on Gina's installation. In addition to the redesign and a laundry list of interface improvements, we've added a few new features,... Continue reading

Less than a month after Google+ opened its doors to the public and added an API, we're happy to announce that ThinkUp now supports Google's rapidly-growing social network. With beta 16, ThinkUp now covers three of the world's largest social networks — Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Download ThinkUp for your own webserver or install it in 60 seconds on Amazon EC2 using the ThinkUp Launcher beta. ThinkUp can now capture the following data from Google+: Your last 25 public Google+ posts, including images and links The number of replies or +1s those posts have gotten, displayed in a handy chart... Continue reading

ThinkUp beta 15 is out! You can download it here. Here's how to upgrade your existing installation to beta 15. IMPORTANT: Beta 15 includes several major database migrations, so we STRONGLY encourage you to back up before you begin. Those of you with a large database should use the command line upgrade tool. We weren't planning on doing another beta release this soon, but tomorrow Facebook is disabling its old Connect login mechanism and requiring all apps to update to OAuth 2.0. This release includes that update, but also adds some huge new functionality to the Facebook plugin, as well... Continue reading

Beta 14 is out! Download it here. This is a huge bugfix release that touches every part of ThinkUp -- usability, security, performance, and documentation. And with four open issues left in the tracker, the 1.0 release is closer than ever. (If you can help, now's a great time to get involved!) Here are some of the highlights in this release: Better exploration of your information with full page-by-page listings of all data and a simpler, cleaner view of tweets throughout ThinkUp Faster crawling with new database optimizations Hardened security making sure malicious code from outside sources will never appear... Continue reading

During the Twitter Town Hall collaboration with the White House, President Obama posted a single tweet to @whitehouse, asking this question: This was historic for two reasons: it was the first time that a President has ever posted directly to a social network from the White House. Second, it was the first time the President's directly asked for feedback from users of a social network. There was some great analysis of the Twitter Town Hall activity, including TwitSprout's infographics and Radian6's detailed postmortem on Wednesday. Both focused on the #askobama questions that were asked before and during the Town Hall.... Continue reading

As the White House broadcasts its first Twitter Town Hall, we've been thrilled by the response and enthusiastic feedback it's generated. It's a powerful demonstration of the federal government using social networks to listen to citizens where they live online. Obama just made history by being the first President to live-tweet from his own session! So awesome. Special thanks to Macon Phillips and the White House’s New Media team for not only making today’s Town Hall possible, but thinking ahead for more than a year, enabling research like ours in the halls of Washington D.C. Of course, there's no reason... Continue reading

ThinkUp beta 13 is out! Download it here. The march to version 1.0 continues, and we're continuing to squash every open issue along the way. As a result, Beta 13 is mostly a bugfix release, but includes a couple useful features and some critical security hardening to prevent cross-site request forgeries. Here's the full list: New features: In Settings > Application, added ability for an admin to export a given service user’s data for transfer to another ThinkUp installation Reply searching is more user-friendly, with a persistent search box in the sidebar SlickGrid: Add notice if search limit of 5000... Continue reading

In this month's ThinkUp Talk podcast, we covered plenty of ground -- Gina's update on the road to ThinkUp 1.0, Sam's suggestions for improving the project for new developers, updates on Mule Design's redesign work, the beta test of my ThinkUp Launcher for EC2, Trevor's new myThinkUp hosting service, and how to get involved with the mentor program. Thanks to Gina, Randy, Sam, Trevor, Randi, and first-timer Aaron for hopping on, and everyone else who chimed in on IRC. Best episode ever! Thinkup Talk #6 June 2011 by Thinkup Special thanks to Randulo for organizing and editing the podcast. The... Continue reading

ThinkUp beta 12 is out! Download it here. Beta 12 introduces several useful new features: user registration invitations, the ability to set a default service user to display on ThinkUp's public dashboard, new version notifications, full support for those of you running SSL/https web servers, interface improvements, and help links throughout -- plus a bunch of bugfixes. Here's the full changelog with links to new feature documentation. Here's how to upgrade your existing installation to beta 12. Beta 12 represents 29 commits by 7 authors (1 first-timer!) and contains a total of 5,645 passing tests, up almost 300 from beta... Continue reading

As we announced here, the newest ThinkUp beta adds an API to the app for the first time, allowing developers to easily build apps on top of JSON data coming from ThinkUp. I thought it'd be fun to try building a hack with the new API, so I made a simple visualization of your entire Twitter archives in ThinkUp — ThinkBack, a ThinkUp-powered time capsule. Take a look at my history, or on the @whitehouse account to get the gist. ThinkBack analyzes your entire Twitter history, extracts entities from the text, and colors them based on category. Grouped by month,... Continue reading

Today, we’re releasing Beta 11, a REQUIRED UPDATE for all installations of ThinkUp prior to April 25. This release fixes a potential information vulnerability in older versions of ThinkUp that could reveal private posts that are stored by the application. ThinkUp only collects status updates from private users and does not archive direct messages, so direct messages are not exposed by this issue. Note: This is not a security update, as no vulnerabilities to either the application or your server are exposed. However, this is still a required update to make sure ThinkUp correctly preserves the privacy of posts that... Continue reading

Yesterday, Twitter released Web Intents -- a dead simple way of integrating mobile-friendly, context-aware popup flows for replying, favoriting, retweeting, and following users from your own app. In less than the time it took for me to write this blog post, I replaced the basic "Reply" links in ThinkUp with Web Intents and pushed the results to GitHub -- about three minutes from start to finish. In addition to replying, you can now favorite and retweet posts from ThinkUp directly. Here's the result, before and after: Making ThinkUp better can be as simple as, in this case, changing six lines... Continue reading

ThinkUp beta 9 is out! Beta 9 is what we like to call a super-fixit happy-developer release. There aren't many new user features, but there are lots of fixes for common problems and several developer goodies. Read on for how to upgrade and the full list of what's fixed, added, and changed. Download it now! Installation If you're running ThinkUp beta 8 or earlier, here's how to upgrade: Visit http://yourthinkupinstall/install/backup.php to back up your data before you begin. Extract the thinkup zip file you downloaded over your existing installation's files on your web server. Visit your ThinkUp installation and walk... Continue reading

On Wednesday, ThinkUp developer Amy Unruh released the latest alpha of her real-time streaming Twitter plugin. Her work over the last couple months fundamentally changes the way ThinkUp behaves — moving from periodically polling Twitter's oft-unreliable API to opening a persistent, real-time connection for each user. Watching tweets pour in, and immediately seeing them reflected in ThinkUp, is very exciting. For now, it's mostly for the adventurous — comfort with the commandline is a prerequisite — but we encourage you to give it a try and post your results to the discussion list. Amy wrote up a detailed guide to... Continue reading

ThinkUp beta 8 is now available, and this one's a doozy. Download it now! Installation Here's how to upgrade your existing installation: Back up your data before you begin. Visit http://yourthinkupinstall/install/backup.php to try the web-based database backup tool, or, NEW! at the command line, cd to /yourthinkupinstall/install/cli/ and run php backup.php. Extract the thinkup zip file you downloaded over your existing installation's files. Visit your ThinkUp installation and walk through the database updates. Developers: If you've already run both the 1/2/2011 migration and the 1/24/2011 migration by hand in the course of development, all you have to do is update... Continue reading

Over on the Stack Overflow blog, Jeff Atwood wrote a thoughtful post about the right and wrong ways to ask a question, drawing from the lessons learned by two of the Web's most successful Q&A communities -- Ask Metafilter and Stack Overflow. What kind of questions should I not ask here? You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page. To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking subjective questions where … every answer... Continue reading