Let’s Talk About Open

It is a simple philosophy really, you pay us to collect user generated content (or Social Media if you prefer) provide you analytics and engagement tools – you own the data.

Every company talks about open and data portability, we actually deliver.

How? We offer you two API levels of service that allow you to get all of the the data we collect – and the metadata we generate – out of justSignal. Maybe you want to feed it into your own Analytics solution… maybe you want to combine it with your marketing and sales data… maybe you just want to store it as a historical record. It doesn’t mater to us why, because it is your data.

So, what is actually in this data – because the devil is always in the details right?

There are two basic types of data you get from our Digest and Real Time API’s:

1. Content
2. Metadata

Content

The content section of the data is every element we collect from the underlying services. For example, for Twitter we pass along to you every single field we get from the Twitter Search API. It is all the content, every field. The same holds true for every service we collect from (Twitter, Blog Search, Backtype, Flickr, and YouTube).

When we add new services (more on that later) they will appear in the content section of the API.

Metadata

As we collect data from the services we examine the data for certain useful pieces of information. For example, we determine which of the terms in your filter were matched for that piece of content – which we use to generate your weekly SignalDensity report:

The following metadata types are currently included:

Content Term

The terms (or keywords) from your filter that were in the content.

Daily Volume Summary

The number of pieces of content we collected by service. Includes the total volume, number of unique users posting, average per user, median per user and standard deviation per user. For Example:

• Date: 2009-10-22
• Total Tweets: 685
• Number of Users: 565
• Average Tweets Per User: 1.21239
• Median Tweets Per User: 1
• Standard Deviation Tweets Per User: 0.89176

This information is generated for every service we collect from.

Daily Top 100 Users by Service

Every day we generate the top 100 users (by volume) for each service we collect from. Included in this data is the User information (user name and link to the user page if available) and number of pieces of content (tweets/blog posts/etc).

Tweet Links

We extract links from the Tweets we collect and generate information about that link. The information includes both the original link (likely shortened), the resolved link (what the shortened link actually points to), the domain of the resolved link, and a wealth of information about the HTTP transaction. For Example:

• Original URL: http://bit.ly/Fle3y
• Resolved URL: http://www.tweetmyjobs.com/jobpostings/2189294?src=1
• Domain: www.tweetmyjobs.com
• HTTP Transaction information including, HTTP Code, Transfer Time, Redirect Count, Content Type, etc

If you’d like a sample of the XML output of the API you can download one here.

As we continue to add services and create new and interesting sets of metadata they will appear in these APIs.

At justSignal we believe you can talk about open, or you can just do it. Our commitment to you is that your data is yours, you will always have the ability to extract it from our service and do with it what you will.

How’s that for open?

If you have any questions please let me know.