We’ve been hard at work for the last few months to bring uberVU to a whole new level. A lot has been happening behind the scenes and we’re really excited to finally be able to show you what we’ve been up to. Let’s jump straight to it. This new release is a whole new ball game.

New Interface

The old interface was a bit confusing to say the least. First, people did not really know what uberVU was about by just looking at the homepage. We fixed that. Second, there was a lot of information on every page that you did not need to see right at that moment.

We broke up the interface into useful tabs, like Conversations, Analytics and Reports. You can access information easier and even though we’re showing you a lot more stuff than before, the interface is cleaner. This new interface shows the direction we’re going in: giving small businesses and freelancers the tools to take care of social media in just a few minutes every day.

Sentiment

This is a big one. People write about your company every day and you might get hundreds, if not thousands of conversations about you every week. Sentiment (whether a mention is positive or negative) is a good filter that shows you what’s important, especially when you lack the time to dive into all those conversations.

If you get a very positive mention, be sure to thank the person. If you get a very negative mention, be sure to fix the problem right away and thank the person for contributing. Easy enough.

Sentiment is a very interesting technology that we’ll cover in later articles, as a lot of people get confused on how it works. For now, just remember this - sentiment is a good way to know where to turn your attention to for important stuff.

Sentiment Evolution

Seeing whether a mention is positive or negative is nice but what’s more important is the overall trend. This new feature shows you how the sentiment toward your company has evolved during the last thirty days.

More Platforms: Twitter Mentions And Forums

Until now, we only showed you links shared on Twitter about you. Now we can show you if you get mentioned on Twitter - even if that tweet does not include a link. Pretty useful.

A lot of our customers also told us that a lot of people talk about them on forums. We took a closer look at this and found it amazing. Forums still make up a huge part of conversations on the Web and we’re happy to be getting those conversations to you.

Premium Version

One of the biggest changes is the introduction of Premium Accounts. Before today, you could use uberVU to search for something without having an account. You can still do that. However, if you wanted to track a certain search phrase or keyword to get social media analytics about it, you needed to get a free account.

As of today, there are no more free accounts. You can still search for stuff and get conversations and analytics for FREE, but if you want to track a keyword, get results from more platforms and get sentiment, you need to get a paid account.

Why We Introduced Premium Accounts And How That Affects Older Users

We got a lot of feedback about how the product should look and what it should do. A lot of people wanted more analytics, more platforms, sentiment, collaboration.

We knew that the product needed those features and the only way to provide that value was to start charging for them. That’s because there is a pretty high cost associated with crawling the social web in real time and building advanced analytics on top, such as sentiment.

What we came up with is a product that’s much, much better than the FREE one and that actually delivers very good value for the money.

As for users who have been with us from the start, you need not worry. These changes will not affect you for the following 3 months. You get the paid account for FREE for 3 months, no up front credit card required.

We have kept all your accounts and settings working so you can login as before. The only difference you’ll see is the improved interface and great new features. You get to try it out for 3 months and then decide if it provides enough value in order to start paying for it.

What Next?

We’re really happy to have come such a long way with the product. We put in the time and effort for you and we’d be extremely grateful if you took a look at the product and gave us some feedback.

There’s a lot more to improve and work on but we know we can get there with your input and feedback.

Thanks for still being here with us!

We admit. We were among the many people watching the Steve Jobs keynote live blogging (while listening to the audio from Leo Laporte’s special edition of MacBreak Weekly) with more intensity than Christmas. It was a big event in social media so we decided to put our own tool to the test and see what the findings are.

The buzz

The tablet has been on everyone’s lips for quite some time, but nobody knew how the new device will be called. It is usually pretty hard to do a search for something you don’t have a name for, but uberVU is smart enough to store everything so we can search the history pretty easy. We searched for: apple tablet, itablet, ipad (the winning name) or islate (one of the favorites names on the rumor sites).

The numbers of mentions increased significantly before the event. Thousands of stories and millions of comments, twitts or forum posts.

On the distribution side the Apple tablet was most discussed on forums and on Twitter. The numbers for the other platforms (blogs, Digg, FriendFeed etc) are significantly small by comparison.

Not to mention the sentiment. People where extremely hyped and our overall sentiment numbers were above 40%. Which is crazy BIG.

The launch

The big moment came. Steve Jobs presented what we all now know as the iPad.  But the reality distortion field didn’t work out the way it used to. The overall sentiment dropped in a matter of minutes by more than 20%:

And if we compile a cloud with the keywords people love and hate about the new device we get something like this:

People who liked did so because:

• It’s from Apple
• It’s made by Steve Jobs
• The parodies on it where great apparently

While the haters did so mainly because of the same reasons, with a few exceptions:

• No Flash
• The price
• It’s like a big iPhone

Conclusions

It’s clear to me that Apple is a polarizing company. It can generate tons of buzz but while there are some people who get excited only by seeing the Apple logo, there is an equally numerous crowd who complain about all the features.

All the tests have been made on the new premium version of uberVU. It will be available to you all in a few days.

Quite a quiet week in social media. Probably everybody is chillin’ after the iPad announcement (we will have a piece about it tomorrow). But we noticed some very cool articles and we wanted to make sure you check them out:

• Turn your blog into a social media hub in 7 days - a miniseries of posts by Danny Brown. With the real-time web is more being hyped as hell, blogs are becoming a little bit old-fashioned … so there is quite a movement to transform them into hubs, a starting point for all your social media activity. If this makes sense for you I would check Danny’s articles.
• This week we had 2 very interesting video interviews with social media activists at big corporations. First was Scott Monty from Ford (thanks to Steve Rubel) & the second was Bryan Rhoads, from Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence (thanks to JD Lasica). Embedded below:
  
  
  
  

  A talk with Intel’s ‘blogfather’ from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

• Big Gaming companies are moving to the social space. Take Two is bringing the Civilizations franchise to Facebook and hopefully will give Zynga a run for their money. It’s an interesting move. We can only ask why it took them so long.
• Brian Solis has yet another insightful article on Google’s ranking algorithm for tweets.
• Seth Godin has launched his new book “Linchpin” solely through the use of social media, by organizing a set of interviews with prolific bloggers: The 2.0 Media Tour
• And the last but not least: Dave McClure makes waves among the geeks with a post about subscription. I would suggest you read it since Dave is using his usual gansta style to explain things….. but to sum up: We are moving away from advertising. To subscriptions. The problem with that is people don’t remember passwords so Facebook, Apple and Google will be the big winners because they have the most used properties on the web.

The day was going normal. Working, checking Facebook two times a minute and Twitter in between. When we noticed a tweet from Desigan Chinniah, our good friend from Gumtree, pointing to an uberVU conversation about Dell Mini 10:

Apparently Dell set up a contest that you can enter by tweeting: “I just followed @DellUK for a chance to win one of 5 Dell Mini 10 netbooks! More info at: http://bit.ly/Mini10Comp #DellMini10”.  Then they ask you a question that you need to answer with another tweet. A lot of tweets one may say … and…. as you can see… quite a lot of people did exactly that, hoping to win a Dell laptop. One may say it is clever marketing, some that it is a spammy marketing technique.

I think spam is a harsh word. After-all is not spam if people tweeted the message willingly. But we can argue there are better ways to create a social campaign, as Desigan pointed in another tweet.

The good news is Dell listened and tweaked the rules:

Now their users are asked to send only one tweet and answer Dell’s question with a Direct Message rather than going public. Not a huge win but interesting how everything happened: 3 tweets, less than an hour and a product that can display some cool analytics and metrics.

What would you do if you were Dell?

What is this badge?

The uberVU badge shows a real-time count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been shared or commented on a variety of social networks: Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Hacker News, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit, Stumble Upon, Delicious.

The badge lets your visitors to see where the discussion is happening and also make a contribution to each platform by tweeting or voting on all the platforms above.

We have also created a Wordpress plugin which integrates the badge into your Wordpress posts.

How do I integrate the badge?

Copy and paste the following code where you want the button to be displayed:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://badge.ubervu.com/badge.1.0.js"></script>

Configuration options:

Custom URL and title

The badge automatically retrieves the title and URL of the page it is integrated in. You can specify a custom title and URL using the following code:

<script type="text/javascript">
var ubervu_url = "http://your-url";
var ubervu_title = "Your Page Title";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://badge.ubervu.com/badge.1.0.js"></script>

The URL must be the final destination URL, after all redirects are followed.

Custom skin:

The default style is the following:

Another skin is available using the style parameter:

<script type="text/javascript">
var ubervu_style = "compact";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://badge.ubervu.com/badge.1.0.js"></script>

and looks like this:

Two small but very important improvements went live this week.

1. The search is much more relevant. Especially for multiple keywords searches. If you searched for…. say “Steve Jobs” a week ago and got many bullshit results now you will find it to be much more precise. Of course there are still some searches where we fail miserably but we are working to improve the formula. So if you have any examples of searches that you think either suck or rule please leave us a comment. We need as many real-life examples as we can to test new algorithms.
2. It’s much faster. It’s a wonder what big difference a few more servers can make. We are doing the best we can to make sure you pages load as fast as possible all over the globe…. but again if you have a bad experience with uberVU overall speed please leave us a comment. Don’t forget to mention your type of connection and region/country so we can investigate.

Guest post by Octav Druta. Octav is the Co-Founder of Trigwee, a community that connects you with people that can help you achieve your own dreams. He blogs at http://www.octavdruta.com and can be reached using @octavdruta.

Our brains are trained evolutionarily to spread negative information fast. It perfectly makes sense, we have to survive, so we need to know what’s wrong in order to avoid it. This happens especially when we’re talking about any kind of threats.

If there’s any context in which we all love to play with information, that’s the Internet. We use the Net to search for info and talk to each other. Thanks to Web2.0 we now communicate with each other via photos, comments, statuses, videos, etc.

I was curious to see whether our inclination to spread negative information affects the conversational environment on the Internet.

I’ve used ubervu in order to see how many people talk about:

• love vs. hate
• no vs. yes
• life vs. death

Here’s what I found:

What do you think about this?

Listening is the way to go in social media. And uberVU can already help you listen to the most recent conversations and see the people involved in the conversation.

How about talking back? Wouldn’t be cool to reply to people with interesting comments and to join the conversation? Since the conversation may happen on many platforms having an unified reply system offers some advantages.

That’s why you can do exactly that from inside uberVU. Reply to comments and we will send your comments back to the original platforms. A reply to a twet will go back on Twitter with the corresponding @username, a Wordpress comment will be published as a comment on the blog and so on. You get the idea.

There is also a new settings tab to manage all your accounts.

Don’t forget to tell us what you think of this feature.