EduTwt Progress Update
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about web analytics and especially how they relate to Twitter. I’ve been using HootSuite, and it’s a fine tool, but they’ve been plagued by downtime lately and when they do work, the tweets they push out are delayed, sometimes by hours.
I got to thinking it’d be useful to have some sort of social media tracking tool geared towards higher education. The idea kept bouncing around in my head until I finally bought a domain name, edutwt.com, and got started coding this evening.
I originally thought that it would just be useful for Twitter, but the more I thought about it and talked with other people today, I realized you could use these short urls to track all sorts of things: Facebook wall posts or fan updates, and even print. Why not slap a edutwt address on a postcard, poster or QR code.
I spent the evening figuring out how to generate codes, track them in a database and fighting with mod_rewrite (we’re not friends). I’ve also started work on some administrative tools. Here are some screen shots. Please keep in mind things are extremely rough.
Here’s the screen to create a new link. You can label your link to help you keep things organize. You can let EduTwt generate a unique code (right now it’s 4 characters, such as h2vs), or you can enter your own. Something I think is very useful is the ability to additionally tag each EduTwt with some Google Analytics code to further track visitors after they click on your link and go to your website. This is optional, of course.
I’ve also built a very simple display of all the EduTwts a particular user has set up. Thanks to jQuery, it’s all sortable. jQuery’s cool. From here, you can see stats on a particular EduTwt.
There are about a million things to do over the next few days:
- User Management
- Statistical Reporting
- Post Tweets to Twitter
- Pull in RSS Feed and auto-post to Twitter
- Build a nice looking website and logo
Needless to say, I’ll be busy. When I’m ready for some alpha testers, I’ll put the word out. You can follow @edutwt for more updates.
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This is fantastic. I’m very excited to see where this goes. As someone new to the Higher Education landscape, I’ve been curious as to how to track social media numbers.
Mike,
Sorry for the long comment but like you I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot (although my personal circumstances have recently changed so I won’t be pushing the plans I was making through).
I often need to link to sites where I don’t own / have access to the on-site analytics, but would like some sort of measure of the interest so using a url shortening service with analytics was an obvious way forward. (As a side note as another use I was also considering it in terms of handling the tracking for email marketing – combined with a seemingly retrograde step of moving back to plain text emails!)
I started to use cli.gs as my default URL shortener and generally I have been happy with it (although the recent new features from HootSuite and cli.gs downtime due to DNS problems with their ISP made me wonder if I’ve made the right choice).
In general I have the usual concerns about trusting cloud services, in terms of downtime, reliability, and especially link hijacking. Given all this I came to the conclusion some time ago that I ought to invest in a custom link shortening service for my institution.
Not being as technically minded as yourself I started talking to Pierre Far, who runs http://cli.gs about the possibility of running an own-brand cli.gs service for my university although I never got as far as talking costs with him. Since then I mentioned it as an idea to a few key people within our Computer Centre who also seem keen to progress this, although like you they would probably prefer to build their own solution.
I mention all of the above, because I think that any proposed solution probably needs to created/implemented at the institution level. Catering to the .edu community from your own domain may be too wide a brief. In effect because you become part of the cloud and could suffer from the same issues as any other part of the cloud, especially if you need to scale up. Therefore I’d suggest that any edutxt solution probably needs to be open source for local implementation.
In case you haven’t seen it – I’d strongly recommend this post http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/01/11-best-url-shortening-services-vote-your-favorite/ as although it’s a couple of months old it talks through the key features that you might want to consider. I’d also highly recommend the cli.gs blog as it might give you some other ideas.
I think bookmarklets, explaining things like integration with Firefox add-ins (especially things like the URL bar add-in), API access and shortening, timing and tweeting links from RSS feeds are all going to be the key features to get right.
I have more thoughts but this comment is already quite long. I’ll definitely be watching with interest and would certainly be happy to do some alpha-testing with you if you need volunteers.
Best wishes for the project,
Brendan