What is ThinkUp? Techinally it’s the new face of Twitalytic by Gina Trapani. ThinkUp bills itself as an “open source social media insights engine”. Rather fancy sounding.
In plain English and 140 characters or less (according to their Twitter bio)…
ThinkUp captures and organizes replies to your status updates on Twitter, Facebook and beyond.
Focus on the beyond portion of that statement, because ThinkUp does a lot more than just organize replies to your updates. Think of it as a kind of account statement for your social media.
Here’s a quick look at the features of ThinkUp.
- Show you all of your replies to a message, across both Twitter and Facebook.
- Show you a chart of your number of followers over time.
- Display a stream of all photos your friends have posted, or a list of all the links they’ve tweeted, and ThinkUp automatically expands shortened URLs!
- Sort replies to your tweets or Facebook status updates by the location of your friends who respond.
- Automatically archive your status updates (tweets) for all of your Twitter accounts — you can let your friends sign in to archive their messages, too.
- Find out insights about your followers and friends, like who’s most popular or who updates least often.
- Archive all of your data in your own database. That makes it easy to export your status updates, follower lists, or any other data in the future.
- Get detailed statistics about your activity, such as your average replies per day, or how often you update.
- Publish a presentable list of replies to one of your questions, including integration with blogging tools like WordPress.
- Whatever else our developer community and plugin authors can dream up
Currently ThinkUp is available in, I believe, an alpha stage to the public. You can download the latest build from their GitHub page.
The install isn’t too complicated, you do have to be running your own server of course. First create your MySQL database, then upload the contents of the ZIP you downloaded from the GitHub page and run the install. The most complex part of the installation process is registering your ThinkUp install as an application on Twitter.com, and really, that’s pretty straight forward.
Don’t have access to your own server? You’re in luck, first two people to email aaron@hijinksinc.com will get access to their own installation of ThinkUp on our servers.