YackTrack - Follow the Conversation!

In the current issue of Inc Magazine, there is an article about customer feedback. The basic idea is that customers tend to be vocal about the products they use and buy:

Whether they are out-of-control cranks or out-of-the-blue evangelists, customers want to have their say. And if you won’t listen to them, the Internet is teeming with people who will.

Obviously, this has spawned a number of online tools to collect reviews (Yelp.com), centralize customer service (GetSatisfaction.com) or just find what is being said about your brand. One of those tools is my own YackTrack.com. I am happy to say that Inc Magazine named YackTrack the “best tool for following blog chatter”. Yelp and GetSatisfaction were also highlighted in their niches.

Given that they also mentioned two drawbacks to YackTrack, I wanted to quickly address these. First, YackTrack only displays the most recent posts. This is mainly done due to the number of results some queries return. Once I find a good presentation paradigm for large result sets, I will gladly give you the option to see more than only recent results.

Second, Searches that “yield plentiful results” are slow or sometimes result in an error. These items were addressed in the recent update of YackTrack earlier this month. I am finding that people are sometimes using YackTrack to look at larger “brands” like apple, google or even iphone. I did not expect this to happen, so originally I did not have any optimizations for such large result sets. I have made changes to fix this problem, and hopefully you are not seeing any errors when trying to find mentions of your brands.

So, thank you to the folks at Inc Magazine and all of the YackTrack users who continuously promote the tool. Getting accolades from you and a magazine definitely encourage me to improve and build upon the base we already have. Thanks again, and I hope I can keep all of you using YackTrack!