Streamified Blog

Finding Twitter users on LinkedIn

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:29:00 -0700

I love automation. So, when our sales lead at Streamified told me that he was spending a huge amount of his time crawling through Twitter and other social networks for “cold” sales leads, I realized that I needed to do something.

In less than 6 hours, I built LeadListCreator.com, which does the work of finding a Twitter user on LinkedIn for you. The process is pretty simple, really: it does a Twitter search, and then lets you click on interesting users to cross reference them against LinkedIn.

The only “magic” here is that it’s comparing profiles on a number of dimensions to create a “confidence” score. For example, after searching for the name “Joe Bob” on LinkedIn, it will compare each result’s bio, geographic location, job history, etc. against the Twitter profile. The higher the intersection between the data, the better the chances that the user is who we are looking for.

Enjoy!

This post was by Zane Claes, the founder and lead programmer of Streamified.

Have you checked out our demo video? Learn ever...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 08:56:05 -0700

Have you checked out our demo video? Learn ever...:

Have you checked out our demo video? Learn everything you need to know about Streamified!

Streamified and LinkedIn: Shares, Likes, and Comments

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 08:36:35 -0700

We’re constantly working to improve our integration with all the social networks we support. Today, we rolled out a few changes to LinkedIn.

Now, you can like and comment on posts from your LinkedIn stream. We’re still working on reaching out to LinkedIn to allow us to support company pages (they’ve only given us access to personal profiles so far).

The Future of Social Reading is NOT another Reader

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:12:00 -0700

In the wake of the Google Reader shutdown, many people in the social spheres are wondering what is going to rise up to fill the gaps. Many have pointed to Feedly or other news reading apps. Lifehacker even did a post about the 5 best Google Reader replacements.

In the tech realm, though, many are discussing the format known as “RSS” itself. This is the method by which bloggers and content creators have been able to “syndicate” their content for over a decade now. Fundamentally, each of the reader apps above are just tapping in to these RSS feeds.

However, RSS is archaic. It’s too hard for users to go about adding RSS feeds themselves; the vast majority of computer users don’t even know what a RSS feed is. On the other hand, replacing RSS with a new format/tool would be difficult. The format is far too well-embedded into the web ecosystem to go away any time soon. You’d need to convince literally millions of website owners to switch over to something new.

The solution is neither a new format, nor a new reader. We can’t plaster over the major shortcomings of RSS with a mere pretty UI/UX. A good start towards fixing the problem would be an API similar to the backend behind Google Reader, complete with full articles and rich media in a portable format (read: not embedded HTML). Of course, we can’t start from scratch: such an API would need millions of articles already in the system, and more added each day. What we need is a social-aware infrastructure (integrating not just with existing news feeds, but social networks and sharing features as well) that combines all these disparate sources.

We’ve been building exactly this API for the last 18 months, and it is already being used by our corporate partners. We’ve used EC2, RightScale, and node.js for maximum scalability, and it every day it handles millions of feed items. Today, we’ve officially released the Streamified API to the general public, and you can start using it for free.

The Streamified API does a huge amount of leg work to combine existing RSS feeds alongside a user’s social streams.

It presents the posts in a way which is predictable and “normalized.”
Each post is a full news article, instead of tiny summaries, snippets etc.
Media is delivered in a way that makes sense: images, videos, etc. are each JSON objects, rather than HTML strings embedded within the text.
Every post contains categories, tags, sentiment, language, and other useful metadata.
All this data is searchable, thanks to ElasticSearch on the backend.

This puts the power in the hands of the developers to create a UI that makes sense, rather than hoping that the RSS feed provides a pretty bit of HTML. You could just as easily make a native mobile app which looks great on a tiny screen as you could build a web app. You could choose to integrate social features, or you could leave them out. It’s all there.

In other words, it is a system which takes the entire social web (news and social networks) and combines them into something that can be accessed and manipulated with a minimal amount of effort.

Instead of dozens of social networks and millions of nonconforming RSS feeds, there is just one Streamified.

There is a 1,000 request/day courtesy limit for all new applications in the API. Developers can contact us to discuss increasing it, but for obvious reasons we can’t release a completely unlimited API.

This editorial is by Zane Claes, the founder of Streamified. He can be reached via Twitter @inZania. If you liked it, your shares are much appreciated (the share button is to the lower-right).

Streamified Recipes: Engagement Alerts

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:22:00 -0700

Did you know that with Streamified’s Premium, Professional, and Enterprise subscriptions, you can create customized alerts? In today’s blog post, Justine looks at using Streamified’s powerful search to create an alert for whenever your accounts are mentioned on social media or whenever you receive a new Facebook notification.

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Everyone’s needs are different, but everyone likes saving time! One way to do so is to let Streamified notify you of important occurrences in your news and social media.

Because we built alerts as a component of Streamified’s powerful search features, there are a ton of possibilities. All it takes is a few minutes to get familiar with how to set up and save alerts.

Here’s a few ideas to get you thinking…

Set up an alert for your mentions on social media
Be alerted whenever your favorite blog or RSS feed posts new content
Track mentions of your brand or product name, everywhere
Track mentions of your brand or product name in a specific geolocation
Get alerts whenever there’s negative sentiment posted about a specific product
Get alerts when a video is posted that is related to your brand or product name

Today, we’ll begin by going over how to create an alert for your mentions and engagement.

Let’s get started!

Click on full search on the left-side menu. Setting up your alert in this menu will allow you to customize exactly what streams or posts you want to see and receive alerts about.
Since right now we just want to set up an alert for your engagement (think Facebook notifications and Twitter or ADN mentions), let’s leave the field at the top blank. Right now, we’re opting instead to just narrow down the streams that we want to see and be alerted about.
On the right of the field at the top, you should see something that says “Search [_ Social Streams]”; the _ will be your personalized number of social media streams that you’ve attached to your Streamified account. Click on this; it’s a link.
A new menu will appear, displaying all of your social media streams. Some of them have a down-facing arrow next to them. Click on those in order to drill-down to sub-streams. In this case, this is exactly what we want; your Facebook, Twitter, and ADN engagement will be in sub-streams of your respective Facebook, Twitter, and ADN accounts. Then pick and choose the sub-streams you want to include in your alert. (It may be easiest to click “Deselect All” at the bottom, then select the sub-streams you want, if you have a lot of streams.)
Click on Done at the bottom. This will return you to the search view.
This is pretty much all you need to do to set up an engagement alert. Since we’re setting up a search for those specific streams, you’ll now be alerted whenever the search finds a new post within those streams. To finish up, click to enable the “Save as an alert” option at the bottom left, then click on Search in the bottom right.
One last menu will appear, prompting you to name your Alert. This will help you keep all of them clear.
You can also, optionally, receive a daily summary email of all of the posts that fit your alert criteria.
Click “Create Alert” to finish up.

You’ll be alerted of new posts that fit your alert criteria by clicking on “Alerts” in the left-side menu. Here’s also where you can click on those posts to view them individually, or mark them all as read. Lastly, you can also manage your alerts by clicking on “Saved Searches” in the left-side menu.

Curious about Streamified? Let us know! Feel free to email us for more information or try Streamified out yourself at http://streamified.me.

Streamified Recipes: Best Times To Post

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:58:00 -0700

Did you know that with Streamified’s Professional and Enterprise subscriptions, you can analyze any of your streams or search results to learn more about the contents? In today’s blog post, Justine looks at using Streamified’s analytics tools to learn more about when followers are engaging.

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Curious about how when the people you’re following on Twitter are most active or when they’re mentioning your account the most?

Navigate to the stream you’d like to analyze, then click on “Analytics” in the left-side menu. Then click on “Stream” and “number of posts.” We like the “calendar heat map” option because it lets you see a breakdown by hour and date, though you can check out the line charts too, of course.

For example, it looks like Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays are especially high in volume for this stream and that 6AM, 9AM, 12PM, and 8PM PST are the best times for volume as well. Interesting!

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If you have multiple accounts for your brand’s presence, you can take this one step further and create a report for the sake of comparison, directly within Streamified. (Please note that this feature is only available to Streamified Enterprise subscribers.)

While still viewing your analytics, click on “Add to Report” in the bottom right to do just that. Name your chart, then click on “Import.” You’ll then see it in your Report. Then repeat this process until you have all the charts you want. Give your report some text so viewers know what you’re looking at, then add the insights you’ve gleaned from the charts you’ve created.

Curious about Streamified? Let us know! Feel free to email us for more information or try Streamified out yourself at http://streamified.me.

Streamified now supports adding your own personal Pinterest...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 22:18:56 -0800

Streamified now supports adding your own personal Pinterest stream!

Pinterest is now a fully supported option under “Social Networks” when you click to add a stream. Just log in with your Pinterest credentials and pins from the boards that you’re following will now appear in Streamified! Whether you’re pinning for fun or for business, you can now view pins, repin to your own boards, like pins, or even upload your own pins to your own boards directly within Streamified!

Let us know what you think by leaving a message with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or App.net. Need support? Let us know at GetSatisfaction.

Streamified Recipes: Finding Related Tags & Keywords

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:16:00 -0800

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Optimizing your content for keywords and tags can be a great way to make sure that new people can find your content when searching. The same thing is true for social media, too.

If you blog about specific topics and you’d like to make them findable on Twitter and other social networks, including relevant hashtags in your posts when sharing links to your blog can be a tactic to consider.

In the screen cap below, you can see an analytics chart I created for a specific hashtag that I see in my Twitter stream a lot - #musedchat.

Here’s what I did:

I navigated to the stream I wanted to analyze - in this case, my Twitter stream.
I clicked “Analytics” on the left-side menu and made sure “Streams” was selected at the top.
I selected “related tags/keywords analysis” and then the tag/keyword that I wanted to analyze.

Now I can see that if I write a blog post on topics like “music education,” “musical theatre,” and “music,” it may be of interest to people who track the #musedchat hashtag. This may be a hashtag that I want to include.

I can also see that #musiced and #musedchat are related hashtags. I might want to include that hashtag when sharing my post, too.

Bonus: If you’re a Streamified Enterprise user, you can also click “Add to Report” to save any charts to your own personalized report!

Curious about Streamified? Let us know! Feel free to email us for more information or try Streamified out yourself at http://streamified.me.

When One Door Opens…

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:38:17 -0800

We first got our feet wet in developing for social media simplification in 2011, with an extension known as Start Google Plus. SGPlus was the result of a desire to be able to streamline the management of multiple social presences and better integrate Google+ with other social networks. Zane’s weekend project quickly became a success and directly led to the beginning of Streamified Inc., in November 2011.

Now, almost 2 years later, we’ve made the hard decision to partially shutter the browser extension. There were a few big reasons behind this call.

The many changes that Google has made to its products, both Google+ itself and the Chrome Web Store, made it difficult to continue to maintain a high quality browser extension. Also, limited programming resources (for the last few months, up until just recently, Zane was our only developer) meant that updating the browser extension in the face of the mutable nature of Google+ put a strain on our team and delayed updates.

As a result, we will try to keep the browser extension updated when able, but it is no longer a supported Streamified product.

What About Mobile?

If you’ve visited our website recently, you’ll also note that links to our apps for Android and iOS have been removed. Both of these apps were not functioning to our standards and we chose to remove them from the platforms’ respective app markets in the meantime, rather than letting them persist to give you a less than optimal experience on mobile. We do plan to rerelease them as soon as possible and we will keep you updated here with our progress.

Let Us Know…

We’re sure you may have questions or comments about these changes to the Streamified suite. Please feel free to get in touch with us by leaving a comment below.

Announcing Streamified Enterprise

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:21:00 -0800

We’re excited to share that after a few months’ developing, we’re able to announce Streamified Enterprise!

Streamified Enterprise is our highest subscription level and is targeted towards social media managers.

We’ve thought long and hard about what our dream social media management dashboard would look like. What features were ‘must-haves’? What features have we always wanted, but never been able to find? What would make our lives easier?

With a Streamified Enterprise plan, you can now:

Listen to the pulse of relevant social media and news with advanced search filters and alerts
Measure your social media performance and identify ways to expand the reach of your business
Engage your audience efficiently with cross-posting, scheduled posts, and team collaboration

Streamified Enterprise is accessible from our web app, Streamified.me, and our Mac OS X app; to learn more about Streamified Enterprise, check out this walkthrough, built with Streamified Enterprise’s new reporting feature!

If you’re interested in a trial of Streamified Enterprise, please let us know by contacting us directly at sales@streamified.com. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Check out a few of the analytics/reporting features that...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:24:00 -0800

Check out a few of the analytics/reporting features that we’re building in to the Professional Streamified package. Let us know what you think!

Using Streamified Alerts to Monitor News & Social Media

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 11:42:00 -0800

Note: This feature is only available to Streamified Premium, Streamified Professional, and Streamified Enterprise users.

At a glance, Streamified Alerts are like a combination of Facebook Notifications, Google Alerts, and Twitter Mentions. They are built on top of Streamified Search to allow you to receive notifications when something important happens. You can even receive daily summary emails of alerts!

The simplest and most common use of Streamified Alerts is probably to combine @mentions, notifications, etc.

To do so, start by bringing up the Advanced Search window. Here, I’ve configured the search to search through 4 social streams:

My @Streamified mentions on Twitter
My @Streamified mentions on App.net
My Streamified notifications on Facebook
My @inZania mentions on Twitter

Note: Alerts are a Premium-only feature.

Notice that I have not added any other filters to the search. This will cause the search to return all posts on these 4 streams, which is what I want in this case: to monitor all of these “mentions” with a single alert. I could use the “search” button if I wanted to check that the search would return the alerts I am interested in.

Next, I press the “Create Alert” button at the bottom of the search screen. Before the process is complete, I am prompted to name the alert and choose if I wish to receive daily summary emails. If I choose to receive summary emails, Streamified will send an email to confirm the mailing list subscription (we use mailchimp to handle our mailing lists).

Now that we have an alert set up, alerts will appear within the top menu. Here, there are 2 new (unread) alerts. Clicking on any alert will open the post which generated it, and mark the alert as read.

The Alert icon (bell) in the menu will also turn red when new alerts appear, and these alerts will be sent to my email address.

Managing Alerts

Alerts appear within the “Searches” menu in Streamified. This means that I can use the “Delete” button to remove an alert, or click on one of them to re-execute the search which powers the alert. For example, I could click on “Streamified Mentions” to see just a stream of all Streamified Mentions across all networks.

Advanced Alerts

The process of creating an alert is always the same, but with some tweaking to our search parameters, some much more sophisticated results can be achieved. We’ve already discussed how to use Streamified Search to look for things like “negative mentions of my product in San Francisco” or “popular discussions about my competitor.”

First Look: Streamified Search

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:55:00 -0800

Note: Access to full search is throttled for Streamified Free (2 full searches /month)and Streamified Premium (20 full searches /month) users. Streamified Professional and Streamified Enterprise users can perform an unlimited number of full searches.

At a glance, Streamified Search lets you delve deeply into any subject, filter posts on location, sentiment, language, and much more. It’s the ideal way to learn a bit more, or even monitor your brand.

Sometimes, you just want to quickly explore a topic in more depth. The Streamified Quicksearch bar at the top of the application will search through all your streams, as well as millions of articles residing on the Streamified servers. For example, the tech world is currently discussing the new Blackberry. By typing in Blackberry, I received a half dozen posts from my Twitter and Google Reader feeds, plus many more results from around the internet - all from this morning alone!

Delving deeper, though, I can click on the [ Advanced Search ] link and a whole plethora of new options appear…

At the top, I have a basic search bar to look anywhere in the text of the post, which accepts complicated boolean searches that can “look for this” -“but not this”. To the right of the search bar, I can select where to search: by default, news articles and my social streams are searched, but I can also enable a public search (just like using the public search bar on Twitter or Facebook).

But we’ve only scratched the surface. (Note: advanced features, from here on out, are for pro users only). Below the main search, there are fields to specifically search within the title, text, tags, or poster’s name. For example, I could type the name of a friend in the “Poster’s Name” field to get posts by just that person (posts by @mashable shown here):

That’s all nice and well, but what about something much more complicated? Maybe I’m a small café owner, or just love coffee, and want to find out what people are saying about Starbucks.

Here, I’m searching for people saying positive things [sentiment greater than 0] about Starbucks, with at least 1 like or RT

Posts from Facebook and Twitter appear. If I were the manager of the Starbucks page/account, many more results would also appear. Streamified uses whatever data is available to it: here it is searching public social feeds, as well as my personal social feeds… but if I were the manager of Starbucks, there would be much more relevant data (@mentions, etc.) to draw upon. Still, even with mostly public data, Streamified has managed to find us plenty of favorable posts about Starbucks with 1+ like/RT:

Still, we’ve only touched the surface. Some more ideas of searches that Streamified can perform:

Posts made by my friends in San Francisco in the last 24 hours
Articles critical of my company
News in Spanish about a new product
Hot discussions (more than 10 replies) about my competitor
And much more…

Finally, at the bottom of the search window, there is a “Save this search” checkbox. By checking it, you’ll be prompted to enter a name for your search, and it will be saved into the main Streamified menu so that you can easily return to it later:

That’s it… for now! Next time, we’ll cover some more features of search, as well as discuss our upcoming charting & reporting features.

Announcing Streamified.me's New Look & Our Browser Extension's Return

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:23:00 -0800

We’re excited to be able to finally share with you the latest version of our web app, Streamified.me!

Over the last few months, we’ve been hard at work redesigning our web app in order to make the reading experience as streamlined and easy on the eyes as possible. We hope that our new design makes it easier for you to browse and catch up on updates from your friends and family.

This update also means that our browser extension is back up-to-speed. A few weeks ago, Google published a change to Google+ which caused the “cross-posting” feature to be broken, meaning that users could not post through Streamified from inside Google+. In addition to fixing this bug, this update also integrates some of the new Streamified.me features, such as tracking post analytics from posts made within G+.

We’d love to hear what you think. Our support site, as always, is available at GetSatisfaction; as this is a new release, there may be some bugs we haven’t squashed yet and we’d love it if you could help us out by sharing your experiences.

In the meantime, please click the cut below to take a quick tour of our new interface!

Upon going to Streamified.me and logging in with your Streamified username, you’ll notice that you’re now able to see multiple posts at once. This makes it easier and faster to browse through your updates.

Hover over the bottom of any post (a magnifying glass icon will appear) and click in order to read, watch, or interact with your content in full-screen. Hovering over the bottom will also enable you to quote and reshare content directly from the streams view, if you’d prefer to quickly reshare without opening in full-screen. Move your mouse over all of the icons here; they’ll tell you what they all do!

To add a stream or change streams, hover over “Streamified” in the upper left corner to open the menu. You can choose to view:

Posts from all streams
Unread items
Your bookmarks
Posts from a specific stream or sub-stream

To post to your streams, type ‘c’ or click on the pencil icon at the top.

More options like settings, our tutorial, and where to log out are available by mousing over the icon in the upper right.

Lastly, when you’re browsing your streams, you’ll see an arrow in the bottom right corner. Click that to jump to the top of your stream. While you’re in Streamified.me, too, you’ll see an indicator at the top saying “_ New Posts”; you can click that indicator to tell Streamified to display what’s new for you to read.

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Again, we’d love to hear what you think! Let us know at GetSatisfaction or send a message our way on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or App.net.

The Evolution of Streamified: Upcoming Redesign, Tools, and More

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:01:57 -0800

Streamified is going through some very exciting evolution over the next weeks and into the new year! Having just hit the 10,000 active-user milestone, we’re excited to be able to respond to the massive amounts of feedback we’ve received.

Redesign

Sometimes you have to admit a poor decision. For us, the “faux-leather” theme on Streamified was such a decision. The slow, clunky nature of our interface has dominated the criticism we’ve received via our feedback forms, reviews, etc.

When we first launched Streamified, the intention was to make a beautiful social journal which combined all streams into one. Since then, the product has grown in complexity, and we’ve shoehorned features into an outdated interface. This has left us with an application which is clunky to navigate, and hard to look at for long hours. Furthermore, the excessive use of textures, mid-shade colors, etc. make it challenging to skim posts.

For these reasons and more, we’re currently working to bring a designer on board to redesign the product. On one hand, we aim to keep the buttons and features in familiar places, so that users will not find the entire interface confusingly moved about. On the other hand, we also aim to tighten up, simplify, and add add contrast/readability.

In short, Streamified is supposed to be about being “streamlined.” It has become clear that our texture-heavy theme does not meet these goals, and our new design will attempt to better achieve this minimalistic aim.

We’ll be posting screenshots and concept art on our social media feeds as we work with our designer, so stay tuned!

Streamified Labs

Even as we prepare for our redesign, we’re also working hard on adding new features. Over the past weeks, we’ve already begun to add tools which can aid you in getting the most out of your social networks. We’re bundling these new features and calling them, collectively, “Streamified Labs.” The current features include:

Scheduled Posts
Post Analytics (clicks, reshares, likes, reach, etc.) (premium subscription required)
Teams (collaborate with other users, share social network access, etc.) (professional subscription required)

Right now, you can only access Streamified Labs from the Web/OSX (desktop) clients. Click the beaker icon in the upper left to gain access:

(here, you can see the Post Analytics)

The upcoming final feature of Streamified Labs will be a large reporting suite, built for social media managers of brands. More about that, though, at a later point!

Bringing it to Mobile

With all these features, we’re experimenting on our Web/OSX apps first, because they allow us to iterate quickly and test new solutions. As we hone in, we will then build the changes into the mobile apps (iOS and Android). During this process, we hope to also speed up and generally improve the stability of these apps (which has been our second largest criticism which we have received thus far).

Let Us Know What You Think

We want to hear from you during this exciting time for Streamified. Please chime in with your thoughts as we share screenshots of our developing process, and don’t hesitate to give us feedback about the products you’re currently using at GetSatisfaction. We wouldn’t be where we are now without hearing from you about what you think of Streamified, so please keep the feedback coming!

Introducing: Streamified for Teams

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 11:59:17 -0800

Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve put the finishing touches on Streamified Teams, available via our web and Mac apps! For those who use social media professionally, it’s essential to have a social media tool that allows you to browse your feeds, crosspost across networks when appropriate, and communicate with team members.

While you and other members of a team may have already been using Streamified professionally to manage your accounts, each member adding the appropriate accounts to their Streamified usernames, Streamified Teams gives you a little more control over account security and content distribution.

We’re eager to continue working on Streamified Teams and look forward to hearing your feedback.

Getting started with Streamified Teams

In order to create a team, the team leader/admin must have a Professional subscription to Streamified (read more about our subscription options and check out your current subscription level here). However: the team leader is the only one who needs a Streamified subscription; Free or Premium Streamified users can be added as members.

First, make sure that all of the social network accounts you’d like to share with your team members have been added to your Streamified account. Then, open your account tools by clicking on the profile icon in the bottom right corner (green arrow in the below screenshot), then click on the teams icon (pink arrow).

Clicking on “+ Create Team” will open up the following view:

Give your team a name, then add your team members by inputting their Streamified username(s). Then select which of your social networks you’d like to make accessible to your team members before clicking on ‘Create Team.’ This ensures the security of your accounts because now, only the team leader needs to have access to account credentials. Other members of your team can have access to your accounts without adding them to their Streamified usernames.

You can administer or be a member of multiple teams. View all the teams you’re associated with and switch back and forth by clicking on the team name in the header - this will pull up a menu like this. You can rename a team using the “edit” icon on the left, or delete a team using the trash can icon. Of course, only the team owner can perform these actions; for team members, the edit/delete icons will be absent.

Manage the members of your team by clicking on the member count in the header. When looking at team members, the icon on the left tells you their current status:

Clock: The user has been invited to the team, but has not yet accepted the invitation, and thus cannot yet participate.
Star: The user is a moderator on the team. Clicking the star will turn him/her into a read-only user.
Eyeball: The user is a read-only member (default status). This means that the user cannot post, like, retweet, reply, or perform any other sensitive action without first receiving approval from the team owner or a moderator. Clicking the eyeball will turn the user into a moderator.

When your team members next sign on to Streamified, they’ll see an invitation to your team that looks like this:

Working with your team members

Let’s take a closer look at my team dashboard.

Here’s where you’ll be able to see the history of your team’s activity as well as communicate privately directly within your dashboard. You can also add a new task and assign it to any of your team members.

Any member of the team can create, edit and assign tasks. A task can be assigned to more than one person.
Tasks which are assigned to you will appear underlined in the task list
Past-due tasks will appear red in the task list

Completing actions

In most cases, working with social networks attached to a team is exactly the same as normal Streamified usage. If you belong to a team, its social networks will appear in your list of streams, within the composer, etc.

The key difference is if you are a read-only member of the team. In this case, when you try to do a protected action (share a post, retweet, like, reply, etc.) you will receive a message like the one below:

At this point, the owner of the team (or a moderator) can open the teams tab, which now looks like the following screenshot. Approving an action will make it immediately take effect:

After having moderated actions, they will appear crossed out in the team history:

Please note: If content approval is an important part of your workflow, make sure that your team members have not individually added the same social network accounts directly to their Streamified account; if they have added the accounts directly to their Streamified username, any content creation or actions they do will bypass the approval process as the system will think that they have the permissions necessary.

The future of Professional Streamified Subscriptions

When we first created Streamified, we had the average social user in mind. We first aimed to create a tool which allowed users to access all of their social media in one spot. As we grew, it quickly became apparent that many users were interested in using Streamified for professional purposes.

Teams are our first major feature towards making Streamified relevant for organizations, bloggers and other people who need to collaborate on their social media efforts. Soon, we’ll be releasing new analytics tools and many other features (brand management, engagement tracking, etc.) For a limited time, we’re offering our professional subscription for $32 per month; once these new features are all released, the cost of professional subscriptions will increase, but current subscribers will be grandfathered in to the old prices.

New Improvements to Streamified.me and Streamified for Mac OS X

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:29:00 -0800

We’ve been hard at work making our desktop products, Streamified.me and Streamified for Mac OS X better to use.

Tonight we pushed some changes that should show up next time you navigate to our web app (you may need to clear your browser’s cache) or open up Streamified on your Mac. Click the image below (or here) to take a closer look, then read on…

A New Tab Bar

We’ve added a new tab bar at the very bottom right of your window.

The first button on the left is a jump to the top badge that will tell you how many new posts have loaded above your current scroll position; clicking this button will jump you to the very top of the stream you’re viewing.
The next button, a profile icon, will open or close your account tools. This is where you can change your theme (by the way, themes are now available to free users), view your subscription level, and read more about how to use Streamified.
the last button on the right is the refresh button. Click this to manually refresh your Stream.

An Easier Way to Shorten Links

You can now shorten links by just pasting the full link into the compose window or in the inline reply text-box, typing the rest of your message, and sending your message. As long as you have the http:// or https:// at the beginning of your link, it’ll work.

Keyboard Hotkeys

Streamified.me and Streamified for Mac OS X now support keyboard hotkeys! This means that you can now browse through your streams using just your keyboard. Here’s the full list:

Next Post: ‘k’ or ‘]’
Previous Post: ‘j’ or ‘[‘
Compose: ‘c’ or ‘n’
Update Streams: ‘r’ or ‘u’

Miscellaneous Tweaks

Thanks to some great user feedback, we’ve increased the font size and lightened the background behind post content to make it easier to read your posts. Hovering over any of the buttons both in the post header and at the tab bar at the bottom will also help explain what they’re there for.

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We’re always listening, so let us know what you think by leaving us a comment here or talking to us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or App.net. Or, leave us a message at our support site. We look forward to hearing from you!

Streamified Integrates with Google+ Pages, App.net, and Foursquare

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:54:33 -0800

Here at Streamified, our goal is to provide a product that you can use to streamline your social networking and news experience. We’re excited to announce three new integrations today: Google+ Pages, App.net, and Foursquare!

All Streamified users, both free and paid subscribers, can take advantage of these changes in Streamified.me, our Chrome and Firefox browser extensions, and in our Mac OS X app now. We’re updating our Android app today as well and will be submitting an update to our iOS app, too.

Google+ Pages

We’re pleased to say that after being contacted by Google+ last friday and a weekend of Zane hard at work, Google+ Page moderators can now add as many or as few of their associated Pages to their Streamified account! The following features are now built-in:

View the Page’s home stream (updates from any Pages or people the Page has added to Circles)
View the Page’s personal profile (list of posts made to the Page)
View any of the Page’s Circles
Post to the Page directly from within Streamified

App.net

In addition to the above, members of App.net (ADN) can add any of their ADN accounts to Streamified. Users can read posts from their feed interleaved with their other streams or choose to view solely their App.net stream. Sharing links and photos and crossposting to other channels is easy with Streamified’s composer. Please note that a paid App.net account is needed to use these features.

Foursquare

Lastly, Streamified users can now view their Foursquare stream and interact with posts by liking or commenting on friends’ activity directly within the stream. Currently, posting to the Foursquare network is not supported.

Coming Soon

As we continue to improve Streamified and integrate with more networks, services, and blogs, we plan to add new ways for you to customize and manage how you view your streams and when.

In addition, we’re also planning to add and improve business-oriented features like brand monitoring, reporting, and more.

Do you have any questions? Let us know at our support site!

Streamified For: Educators

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 22:37:44 -0700

In case you haven’t noticed, we at Streamified are big fans of Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and social networks and we hope you are too! We wanted to share a few ways that certain users may be able to use Streamified to more easily keep up with the information that’s important to you. Today, I (Justine) will be talking about how Streamified can help educators get the most out of Web 2.0.

If you work in education, you may have heard of a “professional learning network (PLN)” once or twice, and you likely have had some kind of experience with “professional development” before. A PLN consists of colleagues, many in your same teaching area, who can be counted on as resources to you. As a friend from my own PLN, Julie Manfredi, describes it,

I have heard the acronym PLN used as both a Professional Learning Network and a Personal Learning Network – I like to think that it’s a combination of both. My PLN is full of wonderful people that are willing to answer questions, give advice and share resources, as well as offer a kind word or listen to one of my rants.

So, what does this have to do with Web 2.0 and, even, Streamified?

Glad you asked! Blogs and social networks (especially when the posts on said social network make use of hashtags, like #edchat), are a great way to share ideas. In fact, much of the discourse that makes an online PLN really great – lesson ideas, questions and answers, commiserating about a rough day at school, etc. – takes place on social media.

At first, you’ll have to do a bit of the work yourself to build your PLN. Here’s some quick suggestions:

Find fellow educators on Twitter and adding them to a Twitter list or two
Find interesting related blogs and add them to your Google Reader account
Start your own blog and share it with friends in your PLN
Join some Twitter chats like the previously-mentioned #edchat; this is a great way to build your PLN (here’s a list of a few more education-related Twitter chats)

Once you’ve started to build up your Twitter following as well as cultivate a great list of blogs in your Google Reader, that’s where Streamified can really shine - especially if you’d like to use Streamified specifically for your PLN.

Here are some suggestions that can help you keep track of the information coming to you from your PLN:

Add a Twitter account to your Streamified username. Your timeline is enabled to show up in Streamified by default, but if you’d solely like to view posts from your PLN Twitter list, disable your timeline and enable the specific list(s). You can even set up notifications for new posts from your list, if you’d like.
Add your Google Reader account to keep up with your favorite blogs. If you have a lot of blogs added to Google Reader, some unrelated to your PLN, you may want to try only enabling certain blogs to show in Streamified. Just click or tap to enable or disable blogs as you go. You can even set up notifications for posts from specific blogs whose posts you don’t want to miss.
Add LinkedIn to keep track of your connections’ statuses and update them on what’s going on with you.
If you’re a fan of Google+, try out our browser extension (available from our website). This will make the streams you’ve added to your username available for reading and posting in your Google+ homepage. Note that you do not have to add Google+ as a stream to your Streamified account if you want to use this feature.
Bookmark posts that you’d like to remember by tapping or clicking on the S icon in the upper-right corner of every post. Your bookmarks will sync from platform to platform so any posts you bookmark on mobile will sync back to when you’re checking Streamified in your browser, and vice versa – just navigate to your Bookmarks stream.
Add a save-later stream like Instapaper, Readability, or Pocket to save interesting links for later. Navigate to your save-later stream in Streamified to see the list of links you’ve saved (please note that this feature isn’t available for free users of Instapaper, due to their limitations).

In order to reap the benefits of your PLN, make sure to also interact with your network as well. Here are some ways to do just that – and if you’re a premium user of Streamified, track clicks on your content right in Google Analytics.

Streamified’s cross posting tools will help you update as many or as few of your accounts whenever you’d like. You can share…
- Interesting links you saw in your streams
- Articles you saved in your save-later stream
- Y our very own blog posts with your network
Built-in support for engagement, like retweeting/quoting on Twitter and Tumblr and liking and commenting on Facebook allow you to join the conversation right from Streamified.
Streamified has support for replying to tweets as well as sending Direct Messages (DMs), too - just input “d username your-message-here” into the Composer and select solely the Twitter account you’d like the DM to come from. In order to check your incoming DMs, just go to the choose-a-stream menu, tap or click on the arrow to the right of your Twitter account, and select Messages, too.

Hopefully, you’re starting to see how Streamified is an excellent tool for managing the flow of information that comes with engaging with a PLN. Why don’t you give it a try? Download Streamified from our website and let us know how it goes. We’re ready to support you at GetSatisfaction, too, if you have any questions or issues with Streamified that you’d like to have answered. Lastly, keep in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.

Happy Streaming!

Updates on Android

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:28:39 -0700

We made some big changes today.

First, we’ve made manual stream refreshes free (no subscription required). We really want to keep the app as free as possible, and wouldn’t have subscriptions at all if we didn’t have server costs to pay!

Second, unfortunately, we bumped the minimum Android version up to Honeycomb (though you can still use older versions).

We really would like to work to make Streamified work on all devices, but this has been a very… odd process. We have a few older devices (eg, Nexus One) that we test on, and the app seems to work fine there. Most of our beta testers on older devices also reported no problems. Unfortunately, we were getting some really bad ratings in the Google Play store that seemed to be related to this.

In any case, if you’re unsatisfied with Streamified in any way, please contact us so that we can work with you. If something isn’t working right, it’s likely because we don’t know about it, or don’t have enough information to fix! So we need you to contact us to help us make sure your problem is fixed.

Thanks,
- Zane