ThinkUp: Capture, Analyze, Share Your Social Network Activity

ThinkUp is an open source software solution for monitoring all that social network activity you've been doing to market your music or on behalf of your music clients. It's available as a free download that you host on your own server. Expert Labs leads development on this project and that's good news because they are a solid organization committed to the long term. ThinkUp's features are impressive and address a variety of issues that arise when capturing, analyzing and sharing your social network activity.

Expert Labs is the development organization behind ThinkUp and you can see from their site that they're focusing a lot of energy on this project. Gina Trapani began ThinkUp as a personal project but, due in part to Expert Labs' work with the U.S. government, ThinkUp should now have quite a bit of institutional interest fueling development.

ThinkUp: An Introduction [Best Viewed Full Screen]

ThinkUp began life with a focus on Twitter which is rather notorious for being a black hole for information. It's in-the-moment emphasis means that exchanges and bits of news quickly disappear which can be a bit frustrating when one is trying to step back and see the bigger picture of one's endless work with social media.

For example, ProfHacker's Mark Sample illustrates a compelling feature, ThinkUp allows you to now only archive tweets but to archive actual Twitter conversations. Even better, it nicely displays an original tweet, the retweets, the replies and quite a bit of data which you can make public or private. The whitehouse Twitter feed provides a compelling example of browsable public reports.

You can get a further sense of what ThinkUp offers by browsing the beta documentation. This documentation indicates that ThinkUp is for heavy lifters dealing with "more than 1,000 friends or followers" where it's easy to get overwhelmed by the wash of data.

The current focus is on Twitter and Facebook which dovetails nicely with the needs of most music marketers.

Given that ThinkUp is open source, support comes through such community features as a github wiki. That means DIY'ers who don't have real technical skills or support won't find ThinkUp such a user friendly product but, for those without such limitations who want control of their services, ThinkUp is definitely worth investigating for possible use now or in the future.

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. Flux Research is his business writing hub and All World Dance: World Dance News is his primary web project.