Joinbox - A Slick Dashboard That Brings Social, Email, And News In To One Stream [Shutdown]

UPDATE: Joinbox announced on December 17, 2012 that they have decided to discontinue the service (copy of message displayed on homepage).

Joinbox is on a mission to create a better web experience for the everyday user. They hope to merge your social activities, email, and news together to form one cohesive consumer website that does it all. This tantalizing video from last year got everyone excited for a one stream solution! One year later, a true product demo has been released along with early access.


Did that get you excited? That sure is an elegant, simple, and fluid dashboard. The founding thought of the service is to bring everything to your personal internet mailbox. Do you travel around the world picking up magazines, newspapers, and letters or are they mailed to your home? Joinbox wants to eliminate the need for you to be opening and monitoring numerous tabs and visiting countless websites every day just to stay on top of your networks and the news. It should also be just as easy to check up on your network when you are traveling or on a friend's computer.

Five founders started this mission in 2010 after they could not find an easy way to consolidate all the incoming information they were looking at while researching to possibly start a freshly baked croissant delivery service. Since then they said goodbye to the croissant world and hello to Joinbox. It has been a long. hard, and educational journey to build in Node.js and to get to where they are today after starting over from scratch this past summer. This information consumption problem is a complex one and can't be solved overnight. After two months of alpha testing with about a hundred users they are ready for a larger private beta. We have invites!

Let's take a look at what Joinbox Double Rainbow can do. Below we see the settings page where everything is setup and deleted.

• Social Networks - Connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts via OAuth. It will allow more than one Twitter connection, but no Facebook pages. LinkedIn, YouTube, and Flickr integration is in the works.
• Email - Bring in emails from one or more services by adding your email address and password.
• News - Search for news and follow sources. Unfortunately this does not support you to directly follow an RSS feed or import a set of subscriptions via OPML.

On the main page you are shown the total unread/unseen items with a breakdown for each stream. You may drill down using the left navigation panel to view everything, only social networks, all emails, just news, or individual accounts within each section. When you click on an item in the middle stream it opens to the right. When available, content is included in the displayed item (photos, videos, RSS stories, Twitter conversation, etc). Tweets do not automatically pull in the content from included links. It would be nice for them to do that like Parrotfish can on Twitter.

When composing a new message you are able to send it to by email, Twitter, or Facebook.

Overall the design is fast and intuitive. If your browser window is smaller it will auto expand the area on mouseover and, as seen above, grey other sections out that are not in use. The only real issue I had was upon login, sometimes I had to refresh to get my feed to come up the first time. Retweeting, replying, favoriting, liking, and commenting all work as expected. I use Gmail and replying broke the "conversation" which I don't like. For a just out of alpha release it is solid and looks very promising. I will certainly be using and testing it, but need to see more features and enhancements before exclusively relying on it.

The five founders that make up the Joinbox team are Konrad Mazanowski (CEO), Michael van der Weg (CTO), Felix Steiner (VP of development), Fabian Jordi (development), and Tobias Kneubühler (development). In the future they want to add more services, chat, enhance email functionality, and tackle news aggregation. With that they hope to eliminate double inputs (you don't need to see the same story on three different channels) and to find what is really important to you. They admittedly have a lot of work a head of them. You can follow Joinbox on Twitter, Facebook, and their blog.

Who wants to use Joinbox? Retweet the below Tweet, or email me, and tomorrow I will randomly pick ten people from those that did to give access to. Be sure to follow me on Twitter so I can direct message you.

Joinbox - A Slick Dashboard That Brings Social, Email, And News In To One Stream - goo.gl/dxLfO
— Dain Binder (@dbin78) February 28, 2012

Archify Preserves Your Online Browsing And Social Content (Invites Available)

Archify is there for you when you forget. Always running, remembering, and saving what you have seen. It consumes your Facebook and Twitter streams while silently running in the background of your browser as you click your way through the ever expanding digital world.

Update July 22, 2013: Archify has been shutdown (archived).

It is a common thing for me and many other people to remember the turtle video we watched last week, but not know what site it was on, or even what it was called. Oh, and remember that great article about beer you saw in your Facebook News Feed last month? That ad I wanted to click on to buy that cool t-shirt when I got paid is not on the website anymore; what was the store called? With Archify these questions will have answers!

Once you complete the signup process (invites below) you will be prompted to install the plugin/extension. The page will automatically deliver the proper one depending on your browser; Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari are supported. You will then connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts. (Edit: February 15, 2012 - LinkedIn support has been added to record those status updates.)

Archify works by using the plugin to save a record of every webpage you visit. The page's text is saved and becomes searchable and a low resolution screenshot is captured (example) so that you can see exactly what you saw on that day. Secure pages that are under https and domains you have added to your personal blacklist are not recorded in any way.

On the social network side it saves every Tweet and Facebook post that is visible to you or that you created. Unlike the plugin, you do not have to be on the social webpage for the content to save. I noticed that new user setups may take a bit of time for the social information to start flowing in, so don't be discouraged if you do not see it right away. An excellent aspect to the Facebook data is that it will import everything since you began using the site, instantly making Archify an easy way to search old status updates. Google+ and LinkedIn connections are coming soon.

Now that all this data is available in your account it can be searched and shared. Let's run through an example to give you a better idea of how it works.

Here we have just read an article about Dropbox. Behind the scenes the extension automatically records the text and takes a screenshot. If you wanted, you could click on the extension icon to open the small window outlined in orange. In it your are able to share the information you just read, place that domain on your blacklist, or initiate a search of your archive.

When you search your index this page will now show up. To the right of the screenshot there are options to share, favorite, or delete the entry. On the left side you will notice the excellent controls available to refine your search. The relevance sorting uses their "Dwell Rank" which takes into account how much time you spent on the page as well as other factors.

A page you share is publicly available and can also be shared.

Now when you search on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Facebook, or Twitter the results from your personal index are just one click away.

Overall the service works very well. The only issue I had was that the extension bogged down my Chromebook a bit, but worked fine on my other machines. Gerald Bäck, co-founder of Archify, has provided fifty invites to the private beta for you to check it out. Follow their progress on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook.

Signup today; only 50 invites available!

Betapad - Graffiti For Your Social Stream

Betapad is an interesting early stage product and iOS app available in Japan. Essentially what you do is draw on a pre-made card, take a picture of it using the betapad app, and it automatically goes to your social network stream(s). It does get a little more complex than that by using a machine readable medium that lets you mark off some options. You can share to Twitter, Facebook, or both, as well as select coloring options if you choose (red, green, or blue). The corners are marked, for what I believe the reason is, to ensure the correct proportions if the image is taken at a slight angle.

I like this concept and it could be a good business model if it catches on and people have to buy the cards. To do that the cards would need a unique identifier to ensure one time use otherwise users will just copy or scan a card to make their own. It may be easier to charge for the app and email the printable template to new users. But, I digress.

The demo video below is a bit light on the details and I had to do some translations to figure out what exactly was going on, which was mentioned earlier. Also, that yellow card is a demo/learning card; the cards you would use are all white except for the marks the app needs to see. When you install the application you link your social accounts so that they stand at the ready depending on how you indicate your betapad drawing to be shared, if at all.

Have you see anything like this available in the US? Add sharing to DeviantART, Pinterest, Picozu, and other networks and it will be a knockout for a lot of artists and doodlers. I think it is a very effective way to digitize and share artwork. CENDO has done an excellent job with the design!

Limk Readies For Launch With Teaser Video

Limk has released a video moments ago providing us with a look at what they have been working on. They have been in stealth mode for exactly one year as of today, January 28, 2012, and look to be gearing up for their early 2012 launch. Limk initially launched back in 2004 as a social bookmarking site by Ozer Dolekoglu who is now the Chairman. The new service is describe as:

A web startup aims to work on a special algorithm: Social Rank + gamified real-time feed, that finds the best content on the web, just for you.

I have contacted Oguz Serdar, CEO of Limk, for comment on the upcoming launch and will update this post when I hear back. Be sure to pre-register your user name now on the site. You can follow their progress on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook.

Kred.ly Review And Impressions

Kred.ly started opening its very limited beta this week. My invitation arrived bright and early on Friday after requesting an invite in September when I found out about the new service from PeopleBrowsr. Kred is an online social influence tracker and calculator like Klout and PeerIndex. I will go through my impressions as they happened; starting off with the email.

From: kred.ly noreply@peoplebrowsr.com
To: me
Date: Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 8:04 AM
Subject: Your invitation to Kred is here!

Your request for early access to Kred is approved. Our team has worked on Kred for over two years and it's ready for Beta review.

We all have Influence Somewhere. Kred is a brand new way to understand your Influence and Outreach globally and within Communities formed around interests and affinities.

Here are just a few of the ways Kred is different:

Separate Scores for Influence and OutreachStrong real-life relationships are based on Trust and Generosity - and that’s how Kred works, too. Influence, scored from 1-1000, shows whether your posts convince others to act. Outreach demonstrates your generosity in retweeting and replying to others.

CommunityReal influence comes from expertise and passion, so we calculate Kred in Communities formed around what they care about most. Learn more about our scoring rules here.

Complete TransparencyYou can always see how actions count towards your score - and your friends', too. Just click on the Activity Statement menu item.

Offline Kred Kred integrates offline achievements with your online identity. We pre-loaded a couple of real world accomplishments for some users and have included a list of examples. To add your own, click on the 'Get More Kred' menu tab once you're inside the Kred site and select Offline.

PrivacyKred offers full control of privacy settings to anyone visiting our site. After logging in, click over to our Privacy page for a full explanation.

Many of the features in Kred started as ideas from our community of friends and colleagues, so we would love to know what you think. Send your comments to contact@peoplebrowsr.com or tweet @kred.

To your Kred!

Tatsiana Sianko
Kred Champion

PS Kred.ly looks best in Google Chrome, our favorite browser. If you don't have Chrome, you can download it here.

I did not link to the privacy page on purpose because it was blue, but not hyperlinked in the actual email. It seems they will show me exactly what makes up my score; surely that isn't totally true because the system could be gamed.

Upon arriving at the website I go to the bottom point of the Kred.ly badge/logo and login with Twitter. Once logged in I expected to see my stats because I am logging into my account after all. No so much. The profile of Tim O'Reilly is front and center (it still is today when I login). I found this odd, and found that he is an advisor to Kred/PeopleBrowsr as noted in the footer of the website.

Continuing on, I type my Twitter handle (@dbin78) into the field on the top and click on the "See your Kred" button. This pulls up the below page (click to enlarge).

You will notice my Kred tab highlighted in blue, along with @peoplebrowsr and @timoreilly in black. Hi there again Tim! PeopleBrowsr is a social analytics company and, as mentioned earlier, is the owner of Kred. So what's the problem with these two connections? Nothing really, unless you are supposed to be a impartial third party. It is just a bit to much up in your face favoritism and promotion for my tastes.

The next thing I tried, as I do with all new sites, is to connect my login/data networks. I clicked on the LinkedIn logo to do just that to find out that it is not yet supported, either is Facebook. That's right, this new online influence measuring tool only looks at Twitter. Looking back it was never said that it would, but it is thinking about it now. When you click on the icons they ask "Should we integrate Facebook and LinkedIn? Click to vote."; to vote you have to Tweet "@Kred, I vote to integrate Facebook and LinkedIn in the #Kred score". To me they should be working on adding it anyway and asking for what is essentially a promotional Tweet is odd.

On to the score. Your global Kred is based on:

• Influence: Your influence score increases when others retweet, @reply or follow you. (Score is from 0 - 1000.)
• Outreach: Earn points to level up by @replying, retweeting, or following a new person or list. (score is from 0 - 10.)

I was surprised to find that their scoring system is fully transparent, but I was not able to link to it so I have made it available here. The profile links seem to only be available to people with accounts; mine is http://kred.ly/dbin78 and I would think it will be public at some point otherwise there is not much use for the score. There are Kred scores for each community (like Klout's topics) that you are active in that then roll-up to make your global score. They are not so good at determining what you are influential about. My top community is Software Dev with Blogger pulling up the rear... pretty much upside down for me.

On the top of the Activity Statement tab you are encouraged with the below header to increase your score and watch it increase live on the screen. Clicking the bold "Send a post and mention" pulls up a Tweet box. This is interesting and seems ripe for being abused.

Unlike other similar services Kred brings the real world to social scoring by letting you claim offline activity that could increase your score. To do this you have to submit a file (PDF, PNG or JPEG) to the Offline Scoring Committee for review. You can attempt to get Kred for anything and have it applied to a specific community or just your global score.

Overall Kred brings some interesting variations to the social scoring arena. In my opinion they have a lot of work to do to be credible themselves. My main concern revolves around people gaming their score, I also do not like the perception of favoritism. I do welcome the addition of third player to the space. Breakthroughs are sure to happen with Klout, PeerIndex, and Kred working on the equation to quantify social influence.

Update - November 28, 2011 - Kred made some updates based on this review; as you can see from the comments they have been very proactive.

• The favoritism has gone away by removing the references to PeopleBrowsr and Tim O'Reilly.
• Upon login you are now greeted with your overview.
• "Coming soon" has replaced "Should we integrate Facebook and LinkedIn? Click to vote."
• The scoring guide has moved out from behind the login wall.

Igobubble Lets Content Live and Evolve

Igobubble is a mobile app for the iPhone that integrates location-aware social networking with continuously evolving digital content by creating "living" bubbles that carry thoughts, images, sounds, videos and other fun content created by users. These bubbles evolve in real time and can be modified, moved and cloned. In fact the bubbles you create have a life of their own. Partially built on Darwinian principles of evolution, the bubbles can grow, shrink, change, divide and spread like viruses. They can even "jump" from mobile to mobile. Any user can grab and release bubbles or modify another user's bubbles. Popular bubbles thrive. Unpopular bubbles die.The bubbles are only available in the real world and only on smart mobile devices.

Know About It Breaks Through The Noise

Know About It aims to help you see the content that is most important to you across your networks and make it easier to stay on top of the topics you care about. Services like Know About It, Summify, and Percolate are working hard to answer the content overload problem. Knowabout.it brings recommendations to the next level with intuitive analysis of multiple data sources to truly show what you want to see, not just aggregated stories that were shared the most.

It starts off by scanning all the links in your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google Buzz streams. Then brings in your RSS feeds (including Google Reader's), Twitter Lists, LinkedIn data, and people you follow on Disqus. Even if you don't have time to read it's recommendations now you can save some for later using the seamless integration with Read it Later and Instapaper. The system learns even more about you when you like or dislike individual items using the web interface.

A daily summary email is sent according to your specifications as well as automatic alerts based on sources or content. Using the filters on the website you can drill down in to the type of media (photo, video), recommendations inside and out of your network, or potentially missed items that come from low volume sources that tend to get lost in the noise.

Give it a try today and let me know what you think. Once you signup and add your sources be sure to give it about an hour to work through your content and learn about you.

46 Analytic Tools to Measure Visits, Social Shares, Influence, Reach, and More

In our current days of increasing social web usage we must, at a minimum, keep an eye on where web traffic is originating from and if it is a result of our own action or a true social share. Comparing ourselves to peers is also a powerful tool. Using these services will enable you to increase readership and social interactions by working smarter and being more engaging.

• Agora Pulse - Realtime dashboard tracks Facebook and Twitter engagement levels; compare to competitors
• Beak Score - Determine the reading grade level of your Tweets
• BuzzFeed - Social traffic tracking with viral spread impact and sources
• CircleCount - Google+ follower count history, post activity, and influence
• ContentScorer - Ranks Tweets based on the followers a Tweet got you, its Retweets, and replies (private beta)
• Crowdbooster - Your best Tweets and Facebook posts and the optimal time to send them (paid)
• Favstar - Leaderboard of favorite Tweets; discover popular/trending updates from the Twitterverse.
• Foller.me - Twitter user data about topics, mentions, hashtags, followers, and location
• Followerwonk - Discover who your Twitter followers are, where they live, and when they Tweet
• Friend or Follow - Helps you increase the signal to noise ratio of Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram
• Google Analytics - Traditional analytics, real-time dashboard, and in-depth social analysis
• Google Page Speed - Tests and offers solutions to speed up your site for desktop and mobile
• Google+ Statistics - Google+ social rank, follower growth, and post activity
• HelloSociety - Pinterest statistics, feed of fan shares, top influencers, and traffic analysis
• JustUnfollow - Feature rich unfollower service for Instagram and Twitter
• Klout - Social influence rating based on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more
• Kred - Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook influence tracker
• Mention -Monitor and analyze mentions of your name, brand, website, etc across the web
• Mentionmapp - Visual way to explore your Twitter network and discover interacted people
• PeerIndex - Social score based on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, and your blog
• PeerReach - Tracks Twitter influence and expertise of topics; finds likeminded influential people
• Piwik - Real-time traditional web analytics that is installed on your web server
• Qwitter - Informs you via email when another Twitter member has stopped following you
• ReTweet Rank - Track your rank and retweets
• SharedCount - Shares on Facebook, Twitter, G+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Delicious, StumbleUpon
• Social Crawlytics - Where competitor's content is shared; metrics, most shared authors/content
• Social.co - Google+, Twitter, and Facebook stats, predictions, influencial follows, and more
• SocialRank - Find your most valued and engaged Twitter followers
• Statigram - Metrics about your Instagram account
• SumAll - Connect 28 services to see social interactions, commerce/payments, site traffic, etc.
• Tailwind - Pinterest analytics with audience's interests, relationships, and keyword monitoring
• Teebler - Reddit, Digg, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter mentions along with domain stats
• Technorati - Provides authority ranking by topic and shows some backlinks
• Topsy Alerts - Track mentions of your brand, event, name, site, or favorite topic on Twitter
• TOTEMS - Analytics and engagement platform for Instagram
• TrueSocialMetrics - Conversation and amplification rates, engaging topics, influencers
• TweetPsych - Creates a psychological profile of any public Twitter user; identifies user traits
• TweetReach - How many people saw your tweets, and who contributed to their reach
• Tweriod - Measures when your Twitter followers are active
• Twilert - Finds and emails Tweets based on specified hashtag, mention, keyword, and domain
• Twitalyzer - Comprehensive Twitter metrics (paid)
• Twitonomy - Twitter analytics, insights, and mentions along with monitoring and data downloads
• TwitSprout - Charts your Facebook page and Twitter stats (growth, influence, engagement)
• Twitter Counter - Tracks your followers and predicts how many you will have in the future
• Twtrland - Snapshot of presence on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook; analysis, demographics, metrics
• Unfollowers.me - Notifies you when Twitter users unfollow you; also manage who you follow

What is your favorite social analysis tool or service? Let us know in the comments below.

Google Launches +1

Today Google has made +1 available as a search experiment and will start publicly rolling it out soon according to their blog. After joining the experiment you can start clicking on the +1 icon next to search results. Your Google Profile will be updated to include a new tab that is private by default (you can make it public if you choose). Your social circle (through connected accounts) will be able to see the items you +1'ed in their search results.

Soon we will see the Google +1 button embedded next to the Facebook Like and Twitter Tweet buttons on every webpage. It seems Google is now making slow smaller moves towards becoming much more social instead of launching one product at a major press event. All these new features will combine into something great.

Additional coverage can be read at TechCrunch, TNW, and Mashable.

Facebook Scares and Annoys Me Sometimes (Thoughts and the Future)

Why? Because it is no longer a website; it has become a portal to a intranet on the internet that has tentacles reaching to every website. It is the overlord, the walled garden, and the Grand Poobah of the world wide web.

WWW2? Facebook's in-webpage world is vast. You can play games, watch movies, spend money, share photos, upload videos, and so much more. AOL 2.0 internet access is rearing its head under the code name of Facebook.

Websites? When was the last time you saw a commercial directing you to a website? They seem to all direct you to their Facebook Page and ask you to Like them. The consumer web is moving inside of Facebook's control. Companies still have websites of course, but that is no longer the destination for many. Scary.

Spam? I spend to much time blocking things in my Facebook news feed. All the Likes are the equivalent of spamming your friends with emails promoting products. I am starting to feel like I am on Myspace. Oh, and those applications that allow you to create something artistic out of the new profile image layout are annoying! Those gaming application can drive you crazy! I don't need to know every single thing my friend does.

Comments? They recently rolled out their commenting system that can be incorporated into any website. This further ties you to Facebook, feeds their coffers, and fills your news feed. I will be sticking with Disqus here.

Movies? You can now rent movies on Facebook and watch them in FBland. Joy, more stuff to see and know about your friends.

TL;DR? Facebook is getting to big and should slow down to focus on improving. A revolt is looming. Just like the exodus from Myspace to Facebook there will be one from Facebook too. Until then, see you on Facebook. Please hurry up +1.

Facebook Pages Upgrade Tour

Facebook has updated their Facebook Pages giving new layout and controls as seen in the below tour. Some of these are long awaited, like being able to be your "page-self" when commenting, and some are familiar like the new picture layout we have seen on the personal profiles. (Click on any screenshot for a full view.)

Let the tour begin:

1) Showcase Your Latest Photos
The most recent photos that you post to your Wall or photos that you tag your Page in will appear here. This area will not include any photos posted by your fans. To hide a photo, roll over it and click X.

2) Navigation Where People Expect It
Navigation links are now on the left, just like on people's profiles.

3) Show the Top Posts on Your Wall
You now have two Wall filters. You can show posts by your page and top posts from Everyone, a new way for people to see the most interesting stories first. As an admin, you'll have additional filters for viewing posts on your page. To set a default filter for your Wall, go to Edit Page.

4) Use Facebook as Your Page
You now have the flexibility to interact with the other areas of Facebook as a page.

• Get notifications when fans interact with your page or posts
• See activity from the pages you like in your news feed
• Like other pages and feature them on your page
• Make comments as your page on other pages

To try this new feature, you can click the link here or go to Account above and select Use Facebook as Page.

5) New settings
You can set defaults for your email notifications and how you post to your page - as yourself or your page. You can also select which featured pages appear in the left column. To manage your settings for email and posting preferences, go to Edit Page and Your Settings. To select which pages appear in Favorite Pages, go to Edit Page and Featured.

Learn more - http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=upgradedpages
Facebook's announcement - http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150090729064822&id=10381469571
Upgrade your Pages - http://www.facebook.com/pages/status

Additional Reading: Facebook Timeline Privacy Settings