So, I am happy to announce that a premium API for YackTrack is now available! Thanks to the good people at 3Scale.net, I did have some help getting the premium part created, specifically handling of the payment processing. Otherwise, you can review the API at the YackTrack Developer site. The API has only two methods at this point, searching for mentions of a keyword and searching for mentions or comments on a URL or blog post. I am planning on extending the API and social service coverage as soon as possible, without changing the current fee structure. There will continue to be a free version of the API which allows a limited number of API calls, but functions in the same manner as the premium plans.

This does mean that the current version of the API has been deprecated, and will be removed around October 1, 2011. That gives you about 4 weeks to transition from the first version of the API to the new version.

You may be wondering about the user facing part of YackTrack, as even I have complained that it needs to be updated. While the API will be the short term focus, I do plan on making some improvements to the user interface as there are some things that should not require huge amounts of work. I still plan on adding premium user accounts, but that is currently lower in priority.

So, if you are a social service that requires this type of data, like a social media monitoring service, or you used BackType previously to get some social data, take a look at the YackTrack API!.

First, there is a minor update to the main navigation, which you can see in the image to the left. I removed the expandable menus for registered users as it was obviously confusing people. Now, you just get a link to the “Saved Queries” and a list of blogs that you are watching. Very few people were looking at older posts of the blogs, and the navigation was awkward at best, so I removed it.

I have also made the menu a little cleaner. You can see the simple rounded edges in most browsers, and simple separators help to keep things obvious.

Another new addition, that is more interesting than a cleaner navigation menu, is the inclusion of blog overview pages. If you look at the image below, you will see what the new page looks like.

Click to see a full size image

As you can see, this is much different than previous blog pages on YackTrack. There is now a Yackability score for the entire blog, though these numbers will be changing over time as I see how various blogs compare. There is also a new social activity chart in the top right section of the page. This is social activity for the entire blog broken down by service. As you can see in the example above, Twitter is a large portion of the activity, followed by WordPress comments, and some other services. Beneath this information is a table that shows the 25 most recent posts for the blog. This is a reasonable number for most blogs to see how each post is faring in social media, but for bigger blogs like TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb, this will only be posts from the past day or two. Also, some blogs are only recently added, so there will be a lag in getting blog social activity and yackability scores.

Keyword queries and blog post details now have the same basic overview information and social activity chart. The difference for queries is that you see the listing of comments or shares from the various social services. The display of those comments has not changed yet, but it will be changing in the near future. I find looking through the services and comments more difficult than it should be, so I would assume most of the users do as well.

What’s Next?

In addition to the query results page redesign, there are a few things that I want to improve. First, there are still some inconsistencies and instabilities in how data is gathered from various services. Twitter support needs to be constantly improved as more traffic comes through that service. I am also looking to improve the blog features, as that was the original purpose of YackTrack, finding the comments on your blog post on various social services. So, if you have any requests for features you would like to see, please let me know by sending an email to support@yacktrack.com or posting on GetSatisfaction.

As always, I am looking to include additional services in YackTrack. As an example, Facebook, LinkedIn and GoogleBuzz have improved their APIs to the point that we may be able to include them without significant amounts of pain. I do not want to start including every service known to man, as that is a maintenance nightmare for very little benefit. That means that niche services like Sphinn or dying services like MySpace will not get included. Basically, I want to provide as much bang for the buck as possible and include more interesting features. If there is a service that you think I should be including, send an email to support@yacktrack.com or post on GetSatisfaction and I will consider it.

So, a better foundation has been laid down. There is still work to do, but there is a much better plan in place. Some things which looked like they would be almost impossible to add, are now possible.

However, when decisions are made, sometimes they do not go in favor of the user. The big change today is that only 13 months of history will be kept for free accounts. This change in data will occur over several days or weeks, depending on how much it affects the live service. Up to this point, I was trying to keep as much history as possible. This is just not cost effective for a free service. You may be asking why I said “free accounts”  or whether there are non-free accounts. Currently, there are no premium accounts, but it they have always been in the plan. There will be premium services in the near future, and longer history could be an option but I am not promising anything yet.

As always, if you have any questions, feedback or feature requests, please let me know.

Just launching a blog is not enough though. YackTrack itself has been updated as well! First, you will notice that the user interface has changed again. Yes, I know it was redesigned only a few months ago, but the redesign did not properly represent what the service does. So, you will notice less darkness as well as sexier dialogs Thanks to YUI, I was able to upgrade the dialogs, clear up a few defects and provide better cross browser support. As with all significant UI changes, there will be bugs, so if you find them just let us know. You will also notice that the “chatter” tab and “home” tab have been replaced with one Search item. One of the big complaints I received was confusion regarding the two different searches, so simplification was needed.

Lastly, YackTrack now supports Google Sidewiki, Flickr and YouTube. Flickr and YouTube can be monitored for keywords, but generally do not make sense for URL searches. Google Sidewiki launched to much controversy, but it does provide a decent way to retrieve comments for a URL. Support for Sidewiki will likely change in the longer term as Google builds out more API support.

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Yacktrack Notification Settings

Now you can log into your account and configure three settings. First, your email address must be a valid email account. If not, then obviously you will not receive any emails. Your email notification format is a default setting for your account and can be either Text or HTML. There are also settings for the notification frequency for your chatter queries and your blogs . You can receive email notifications when we see changes, the “Instant” option, or as part of a daily email, the “Daily” option. The recommended settings are to receive HTML emails with “Instant” notifications for your chatter queries, and daily digests for your blog posts.

Your chatter queries and blogs also have the same notification settings so that you can get different notifications for different queries if you wanted. At this time, you will need to change your account settings for the notifications as well as go to your queries and blogs and make the notification changes. This was done due to the fact that a majority of users only have 1 or 2 chatter queries and blogs that they follow.

I apologize for the lack of status regarding YackTrack, and I would love to know what type of information you would like to hear about. I know I tend to post status only when new features are being released, and for many of you that may not be enough. If you would like to see more information from or about YackTrack, please let me know or send an email to support@yacktrack.com.

Lastly, if you have any requests for new features or other general feedback, please do not hesitate to send support@yacktrack.com an email. I always love hearing from YackTrack’s users.

YackTrack Chatter Redesign

As you can see there are some other changes on that page (you can click the image to see it full size). First, you will see that above the search results, there are two pieces of information, what you searched for and something called “Yackability”.

Yackability is YackTrack’s attempt to measure how much conversation is occurring for a particular search. It is a measure of the number of votes and comments on each service that YackTrack supports. For each service, the number of comments and votes or likes are included as well. This number may not equal what you see as YackTrack searches only return the most recent search results. However, all votes and comments are not created equal. Mostly, the votes required to make a difference is highly dependent on the amount of traffic a site gets. Obviously, I will not go into detail as I do not want to give away the “secret sauce”. Also, the Yackability index will be updating for a while today, so do not get upset when you see your blog post with a Yackability of zero.

YackTrack Dashboard Redesign

The dashboard has changed as well in order to keep a consistent look on the site. Again you can see the collapsible sections and the content has been reorganized. The Queries section only holds the Chatter queries and those blog posts that are not linked directly to a blog that you have registered. The Blogs section holds your blogs and the posts grouped by month. Obviously, the table for high volume blogs will still be large, but this is a big improvement from the old version of the dashboard. Again, the Yackability measure is included for each Chatter query and each blog post.

As usual, with any update and maintenance, please let me know if you see any problems. You can always email us at support at yacktrack.com. I will be actively making minor changes and fixes over the next two weeks to ensure it is stable.

What’s Next

The next major update will likely include better Twitter integration and some performance improvements. As YackTrack has grown, the database needs to be continuously maintained. Some of this results in standard database maintenance, while others may require larger changes especially when dealing with Twitter. There will also be an update to the API at some point in order to give access to the votes, comments and Yackability index.

Otherwise, if there are features or services you would like to see integrated into YackTrack let me know as soon as possible. Just email support at yacktrack.com with any of your feedback. You can also follow us on Twitter using either @yacktrack or @robdiana. And I apologize for being such a slacker with the YackTrack Twitter account

This also makes it a little more obvious to those people who are not registered, that there is some benefit to registering. The other user interface changes are all regarding authentication. So, if you click the login, register or change password links, you now get a modal dialog instead of the nasty page-based form. I figured that these changes are fairly minor from the user experience perspective and did not require some big redesign release. The other benefit of using the modal dialog is that it will refresh the page you were on. So, if you had just searched for something, the results will be refreshed and you have the nice save link at the top of the results. Again, this is a minor tweak, but I think it makes a difference.

In addition to the user interface tweaks, I have added support for Reddit and partial support for Google Reader for all URL searches. I am still trying to determine the best way to integrate Google Reader, but for now the Google Reader support uses the RSSmeme API to gather the shared notes.

As usual, if you have any requests, suggestions or problems, just let me know. You can find me on Twitter, or the YackTrack Twitter account, or the GetSatisfaction forum.

YackTrack Dashboard

So, what’s new in this release? First, there are a bunch of minor tweaks that I will not list as you probably will not really notice. The main feature that was added was user registration. By allowing registration, we now have a dashboard where you can save your searches as well as register a blog. I have a lot of plans for the dashboard, but I figured it was more important to get the first version out before too long. The dashboard has the list of queries that you have saved and the blogs that you have registered. If you register a blog, YackTrack will get RSS updates from your blog, detect new posts and save them as queries. That way, you just need to go to your dashboard to see all of your current searches.

[UPDATE] Ack! I totally forgot to mention that all of the account related stuff is now in the upper right corner of the page. If you are not logged in, there are Login and Register links. When you do logon, you will see a nice greeting, the My Account link where you can change your display name and timezone, the Change Password link and the Logout link.

I am sure that you are wondering whether that is everything. I understand it has been a few months since the last update. However, this is what you get today. The next release which will be coming quicker than “a few months” will be a redesign of the user interface. Currently, the interface is very limiting in what I can do, so I want to prettify it and generally make it easier to user. If you have any user interface requests, I will gladly consider them.

Two other minor points to add are related to customer service. First, YackTrack has its own Twitter account now. Thankfully, the username is just yacktrack, so no thinking is needed to find it. I was thinking that the Twitter account could be used for quick questions and basic contacts. The second customer service item is that you can now find YackTrack on GetSatisfaction.

Now that this release is done, I am going to ask for feature requests again. In the next week or two, I plan on listing what has been requested and maybe run a poll to see what people really want.

So, get out there, register your blogs and follow the conversation!