Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 12th June 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Getting a Facebook Vanity URL? Here’s how to keep track of who’s using it
It’s all very well grabbing a Facebook Vanity URL when they launch in a few hours’ time, but how do you track who’s using it?
SocialToo may have the solution. The company, which already offers a range support services like auto-follow, unfollow notifications, filtering and survey creation for social networks, is reportedly to launch an analytics service for Facebook.
SocialToo already offer a redirect URL service for Facebook that allows users to give out an easy-to-remember address for their Facebook profile. With Facebook Vanity URLs, that service is suddenly not needed so SocialToo founder Jesse Stay has found a way to add value to his offering.
Quoted by The Inquisitr, he explains:
“…tonight you’ll be able to get a Facebook vanity URL and get the SEO benefits, but the URL you’ll want to hand out to all your friends will be your SocialToo vanity URL because we’ll provide statistics around those clicking on the URL, the browsers they’re using, where they’re located, and where they’re clicking from (if available).”
This is a great idea, whether you’re using Facebook for business or you’re just nosey as to who’s stalking your profile. What’s more, in the near future they’re looking to extend the service to Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. An API will also be made available for developers to add this service into their applications.
The idea is a great ’save’ from SocialToo, who would have been sitting on a useless product from tonight. Let’s face it, an ‘official’ Facebook vanity URL is much more desirable than a third party one. With the new analytics dimension, they may just hang onto their customers and even gain a few more.
This isn’t the first time SocialToo have had to revise their offerings based on changes beyond their control, although it’s usually Twitter that is the culprit. Jesse Stay has frequestly complained about how Twitter makes changes to its service without consulting people who make a living from Twitter support services.
It’s all very well grabbing a Facebook Vanity URL when they launch in a few hours’ time, but how do you track who’s using it?
SocialToo may have the solution. The company, which already offers a range support services like auto-follow, unfollow notifications, filtering and survey creation for social networks, is reportedly to launch an analytics service for Facebook.
SocialToo currently offer a redirect URL service for Facebook that allows users to give out an easy-to-remember address for their Facebook profile. With Facebook Vanity URLs, that service is suddenly not needed so SocialToo founder Jesse Stay has found a way to add value to his offering.
(more…)
Written on 17th April 2009
0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Ruigrok | NetPanel, research partner of The Next Web, conducts online research to measure webusage of consumers. Every year, results are compared to the year before to discover or uncover trends on the usage of the web. What kind of websites and applications do we use, in an active or more passive way? How active are we on online networks and mobile internet?
And, with all of our personal information we leave on the web, how do we think and act on behalf of our ‘online identity’? How do we spend and earn money online? And how do we feel about the usability of websites in general? And more..
The complete report of The Next Web 2009 will be available online (in Dutch) by the end of April. This report will contain target groups (women verses men, young versus old etcetera).
Written on 29th August 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Earlier this week, an interesting Twitter tracking tool from Ireland launched. It’s called Tweetrush and it shows exactly how active you and I are on the microblogging service. After months of guessing about how popular the service really is, this tool gives us the Gnip-based truth (Guh-nip is a service that makes it easy to aggregate user data). Here’s last week’s amount of tweets:
Some other info Tweetrush offers: hourly averages, top tweeters (somebody already tweeted 113 times today), a personal statistics page, and the amount of active tweeters (199,022 yesterday) . The last number surprised me, I expected a higher number than that. Anyhow, these 199,022 Twitter users tweeted on average (1,036,757/ 199,022) five times. That makes me a bad Twitter user, as I tweet four times a day (sorry about that). Check your numbers here.
The two things Tweetrush doesn’t include, are the direct messages and tweets from protected users. Thus the statistics Tweetrush provide only give an idea of Twitter as a one-to-many tool. That means Twitter is actually more popular than this statistics tool shows us, since many people use it as an alternative for SMS text messages (Well, at least they do in the US, Canada, and India).
Tweetrush was powered by the developers of Rush Hour, a service that will provide real time action and event based analytics in the near future.
Written on 27th March 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
Asi Sharabi has written his second report on Facebook Applications Trends. You can see my post regarding his first report here. I find Asi’s reports to be extremely interesting and useful. 
Any person/company that’s currently offering or plans to offer an application on Facebook, should definitely read both reports to get an idea on “what’s hot and what’s not” as far as apps go. In the first report Asi focused on the 100 most popular apps according to number of installs. This report focuses on the apps that have the highest number of active users. Looking at these apps allows us to truly understand what makes a sustainable Facebook app. All data in the post is taken from adonomics , an amazing site which provides all sorts of great statistics regarding Facebook applications.
Asi writes:
As some people have already noted there is a sense of ‘apps fatigue’ and this indeed reflected in the data. Still, according to recent report while there is for the first time a slow decrease in the apps fair, on average 51% Facebook users interacted with FB apps pages in January.”
Most of the prevalent, multi-million installs apps have fairly low percentage of active users. Evidently, it is one thing to create a ‘viral’ application and get loads of users to install it (which occasionally been achieved with some dirty tricks and is getting increasingly difficult), but it is a different thing altogether to create a sustainable application, i.e. application that’s not just a passing gimmick but one that offer lasting value that people keep using over time.
I think that part of the reason why users are fatigued by Facebook apps is because there are very few apps that offer users real added value. Succeeding in getting people to install your app is great. But that’s only the first step. The real challenge lies in creating a sustainable application which people will actively use.
There are currently 20,861 applications on Facebook (140 apps are uploaded daily). Only about 170 apps have over 1 million users. About 800 have 100K to 1 million users, around 2200 have 10K – 100K users, around 4300 have 1K – 10k users, which leaves us with about 13,000+ apps with less than 1K users. (more…)
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
