Google Buzz Stats Now Available Via App Engine Project

With Google Buzz still being considered very new, just a little over a month after its introduction, it has been interesting to see users adapt to the new aggregation engine - seeing some use it to pull in their content and others using it as a self-contained blogging platform. Some people see lots of activity on their feeds, while others get significantly less. Now, as we have seen with products like TweetStats for Twitter and a multitude of packages for blog statistics, we now have the first entry (of many, no doubt) aimed at showing your activity on Buzz, and how much traction your feed is getting, along with details on who is commenting, and how much they are saying.

The new project, hosted on Google App Engine, authored by Siegfried Hirsch, analyzes your last 100 entries to Buzz, from any source, shows their origin, counts up the words, characters and replies, and displays the people interacting with your feed.

My Top Level Statistics for the Last 100 Buzz Entries

As Buzz does not yet have an official API, there is a lot of information hiding from the initial cut, such as the total number of "likes" for your feed, who is liking your content, and any data beyond the first 100 posts. It also does not analyze your own personal activity - trying to find just where you are commenting and liking through your own network (although Google's Dashboard can give you some top-level stats).

Who Is Engaging On My Buzz (and how often)

As I ran the numbers for a number of people on Buzz, from the highly prominent Googler DeWitt Clinton (whose script was the inspiration for this project) to Twitter's John Kalucki, Jesse Stay and myself, it seemed that those who posted natively to Buzz gained the most engagement, while those who piped in activity from third party services - such as Twitter - got less.

DeWitt's Unique Set of Data from Buzz

DeWitt, who has 76 native Buzz entries, saw responses from more than 430 unique authors, with 12 different people (him and myself included) making more than 25 comments on those entries. In contrast, 156 different authors made comments in my last 100 entries, the overwhelming majority of which have been shares from Google Reader.

DeWitt's Engaged Buzz Followers

Not unsurprisingly, DeWitt's native entries into Buzz are much longer than my shares, which are often excerpted. While my 100 posts totaled 4,228 words, the 76 posts he provided were a whopping 18,380 words, or more than 240 apiece. The attention to length resulted in nearly 2,200 comments on his items, with an average of 61 words per reply. The nearly 400 comments I received had a similar 57 words pre reply over the last 100 entries.

The Buzz-Statistics engine is billed as version 0.1, and has some work to do. I found it often lagged with larger accounts (my own included), but it's an intriguing first step into getting analytics data out of the new platform. You can check out your data by going to http://buzz-stats.appspot.com/ and entering your Google user ID.

Emend Lets You Play Copy Editor for the Entire Web

This evening, I got an odd alert from Twitter saying I had made an error with yesterday's story about optimizing headlines. Amusingly, in that story about headlines, I had made a simple copy mistake, confusing "you" with "your". The alert came from an application called "Emend", which, since its start in November of last year, has suggested almost 70 edits Web-wide, regardless of their source.

The service, which is hosted on Google's App Engine, lets you log in with your Google credentials, and report copy mistakes for any Web site or blog out there, from mine, as was the case today, to Wired, FiveThirtyEight.com, ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, the New York Times, or practically anything.

The process is fairly straight forward.

Once logged in, to make "a new edit", just enter the offending URL, show the original copy that needs to be changed, and offer a proposal. When you hit submit, the proposed edit is added to the service's open items list and sent to their Twitter stream.

You can't post edits to Emend anonymously, which is good, and you can see your own list of submitted items (see mine here). From this list, you can choose an open edit and Tweet it from your own account, declare it "fixed", or if you're more daring, you can send a Trackback or pingback to the page - which would be more "in your face."


Anybody who has been on the Web for a good amount of time knows there is a secret army of grammarians waiting for you to slip up, mixing there and their or it's and its. Now, with Emend, you can make the process official and glory in your grasp of the language (or just openly mock those who don't get it right). A list of most edited sites is kept, including the status on proposed changes.

For fun, and just to see if I could tweak my cranky Canadian friend Steven Hodson, I suggested an its vs. it's problem from his own blog, using Emend, and blasting the edit out via Twitter. (see here)

If he doesn't change this post, I'll leave it open, but if he finds the time to make an edit, I'll declare it closed. It's essentially quality assurance for the Web. And if you tweet a proposed edit using Emend, I'll see it and do the best I can to fix things.



See if you can annoy your favorite blogger or journalist today at http://emend.appspot.com.

Disqus2FF Mashes Up Fractured Conversations

Who really owned the comments... the original poster or the aggregation site that "stole them away" was one of the biggest small-time blog wars on the Web in 2008. Whether bloggers were complaining about seeing comments and conversation moved from their blog and instead taking place on FriendFeed, Socialmedian or Shyftr, or debating whether they could trust comments in the cloud, it became clear that the only consensus was that there would be no consensus. You either embraced the new tools, or you yelled loudly against them. Today, an interesting tool via Disqus has let bloggers effectively synchronize comments between their blogs and the popular FriendFeed service, meaning people can comment in either place, and see it end up as part of the conversation - wherever it is.

And guess what? We've already implemented it on this blog for louisgray.com.


Set up your API key on both services...

As the Disqus blog points out, an enterprising Disqus community member, Carter Rabasa, put together a quick application on Google's App Engine, called FF2Disqus. By entering your API key for both Disqus and FriendFeed, assuming you use both services, the tool will check your blog posts on FriendFeed and pull in FriendFeed comments to your site, or send Disqus comments to FriendFeed.


The result spits out the copied over comments...
There's no installation process, no scripting and no code. Just run it once and you're good to go.

You can choose to make the connection unidirectional, from either FriendFeed to your blog, or the other way, or to have full synchronization. I enabled it to copy over FriendFeed comments to my site, effectively replacing the Yahoo! Pipes solution I'd asked Pat Hawks to create last June.

The result is pretty straight forward. If there is a comment on FriendFeed, it is displayed by Disqus on my site, in the order it was posted, and the author's ID links to their FriendFeed user profile. Now, what the solution doesn't do is crawl FriendFeed and find all comments on all reshares or tweets of your blog. It just gets the one main entry, which I think is good enough. It also is bound to have some disjointed entries as conversations are smashed together, but it should be a good experiment to see how the two could merge.

If you're a FriendFeed user and a Disqus-enabled blogger, you should really check out FF2Disqus at https://ff2disqus.appspot.com/.

15 Useful Google App Engine Applications

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Google App Engine, which was released in April 2008, is a platform for building, hosting and scaling web applications using Google's infrastructure. It allows a developer to build and test web applications without the worry of maintaining servers, and so forth. It's pretty much a plug and play type of solution, just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users. A lot of these applications are very raw and are just test beds for the developers. There are quite a few that are useful and have some potential. This post highlights 15 of them.

1) Down or Not

This is a simple utility that will tell you if a website is online or offline. This site also displays a tag cloud of the last 100 or so websites that have been queried for their uptime.



2) Check Google Pagerank

This will allow you to check your website's Google Pagerank. What's also great about this utility is the ability to check Pagerank for up to 100 domains per time.

3) Jumbra

Jumbra allows you to combine your favorite RSS/Atom feeds into a single RSS feed. This could save a lot of time with unnecessary checking of multiple feed urls. You can combine up to 30 feeds to create one custom master feed. You can also share this url, and when you add new feeds, your jumbra feed will update automatically. I also set up a testing Jumbra RSS feed you can take a look at.


4) Browse the iPhone app store

This application is an HTML version of the iPhone app store. You can see the full previews of any selections available for purchase such as music, movies, games, apps etc. I particularly like this app because you can browse the iPhoneappstore without the iTunes software. It's at the point of purchase that you are directed to the Apple iPhone App Store, where you must have the iTunes software installed to complete the sale.


5) Go2

Go2 is a quick, free web Proxy. Proxy servers usually sit between an application such as a Web browser, and a web server. They intercept all requests to the real server to see if it can fulfill the requests itself. I tested it by using a simple http request, and it worked. The results and IP address all point back to Google's network. Black Spider is also another Google App Engine/web proxy that works well.

6) TCP3 Short and Tiny URL Generator

TCP3 is a url shortening application. It serves the same purpose as the rest of these services do and it works efficiently. There is an option for creating vanityurls. They also offer a gadget for iGoogle, and a toolbar shortcut that you can use to shorten the url of whatever page you happen to be on at the moment.


7) MyTextFile

MyTextFile is an ajax-powered notepad for quickly storing bits, or a single plain file of text. You can use it to store notes, snippets of text, web urls,or any other form of scribbled information. Login in with your Google credentials, and easily write notes on the fly and access them anywhere.


8) URL-Info

This application allows you to find out more information behind a specific web url. This retrieves the HTTP headers, links, images, and others information. Be sure to add this tool to your SEO toolbox.


9) Linkius

This application gives you your own custom mobile url to access and store bookmarks. The bookmarks are accessible via your mobile optimized url. You can create groups, and add new links directly from your desktop. I find this to be a pretty simple and solid application for what it was designed for.

10) Treksee Map Pedometer

This is a useful mash-up that will show you the distance between two points, in miles or km. You could use it to track how far you drove, biked, jogged etc. I could see myself using this for plotting the mileage points on family summer vacations, which involves a lot of time spent on the road.


11) PrintWhatYouLike.com

This application allows you to print only the the relevant data on a web page. This is done by letting you remove or reformat the elements on a web page. Trim the excess junk, white space, advertisements and save paper in the process. This should be a definitebookmarker.


12) News Served Del.icio.usly

This is an interesting tool for discovery. It works by finding and reading the latest news by using your Delicious tags. You give the site your Delicioususername only and it generates news categories that are basically personalized with your bookmark tags. Clicking a tag will bring up the most relevant news sources for it, that are pulled from blogs and other news sites.



13) Re.flect.net

Re.flect is a simple website mirroring service. Here's how it works. "Give it a URL and Re.flect will attempt to serve a pre-cached copy of that URL. If the cached copy does not exist it will try to cache and serve that request on-demand, future requests will then be served from their cache limiting demand on the originating server."

14) Lullar Com

This application allows you to search and find people across the social web. You can search for social profiles by email, first name, last name orusername. It's very similar to usernamecheck.com.


15) Spy

Louis wrote a nice review on Spy back in August. Spy is great for monitoring elements of the social net for topics of interest and brand monitoring. The service scans in real time, Twitter, Google Reader, FriendFeed and more. Looking backwards as little as one hour, or as much as two days for the relevant topic sources. It's a great way to visualize the social media conversations going on about a specific topic.



You can find more interesting and usefull apps at the Google App Engine Application Gallery.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.