Brand Monitoring with Particls

The issue of Brand Monitoring is one of those things that is super important, but super hard to get a grasp on. There are tools that measure influence like BuzzLogic and others that let you search for blog posts like Google Blogsearch and Technorati, but a tool that monitors the conversation and alerts you in real-time seems to be hard to come by.

Recently, more and more people are talking about Yahoo! Pipes for brand monitoring. It's not a bad idea. Pipes is a great tool for assembling complicated RSS pipelines and could, with quite a bit of work and understanding, be used to get a pretty good brand monitor going.

Or you could use Particls. Particls is like a Yahoo Pipe dedicated to monitoring topics of interest. Your brand is definitely of interest. So is your high profile/visible staff, and your competitors, and their products, and your suppliers, and their brands.

You want to know everything about everything related to your business so you can react quickly and decisively.

Manufacturers, VCs, Lawyers, Retailers, Startups - you name it. Brand and Business Monitoring is critical.

So don't just think of Particls as your solution for the latest Paris Hilton news - it can also get you the latest M&A news - right along side Flickr photos from your kids.

We actually use Particls to monitor news and chatter about Particls. Many people are actually surprised at how quickly we respond to blog posts and tweets as a result.

Mix 07 Ray Ozzie Keynote - Winforms apps are dead

The Mix07 Keynote by Ray Ozzie was incredibility interesting for those of us in the software development community. Here are the highlights - some of which you may not have heard said in these explicit terms.

• Silverlight now enables the development of complete XAML based applications in a browser - they can be just as powerful as if they were installed on the target device - and they are lightweight enough to deliver over the network - on both Mac AND Windows.
  
  
• Those same applications can be packaged to run on the target device and outside the browser (both PC and Mobile Devices). In addition, the same tools and assets can be used to develop server-side business logic (web services etc).
  
  
• So this means you can use the same languages and tools to create technology that runs anywhere in the ecosystem.
  
  
• You can now make rich vector based (flash style) applications using dynamic languages AND object orientated programming - making Flash/Apollo and vanilla AJAX look like child's play.
  
  
• Just because they are child's play does not mean they are dead. People have used, and will continue to use, 'Good enough' solutions for many reasons.
  
  
• 95% of desktop apps (and scenarios that justify building winforms/desktop apps) will therefore die over time EXCEPT apps that require outside the browser notification or compact/persistent presentation. This excludes the browser itself of course.
  
  As shown by Apollo you can now build Photoshop as a web-based app - imagine what Microsoft is doing with Silverlight (Let me help you out - Office Online).
  
  
• Many of the demos shown are about creating customized players for streaming video. Do users want highly immersive media players that change from vendor to vendor? Or do they want a Joost that has a consistent user interface with plenty of cross-network functionality? The MLB.com demo for example, basically showed a Joost style user experience for a single site.
  
  Some scenarios might support it - but most users would prefer to be able to surf from provider to provider while keeping the same User Experience.
  

This increases the opportunity for 'Internet Operating System' infrastructure plays such as storage, contacts and, of course, a universal, personalized incoming events and notification pipeline.

Update:

Other coverage is on Techmeme

Robert Scoble writes:

"Jeff Prosise, co-founder of Wintellect. He told me that yesterday will be remembered as the day Microsoft rebooted the Web. Hyperbole? Maybe, but don't miss why he's excited: he's going to be able to take his .NET skills and make Web experiences that are going to be far beyond what you can do with HTML and AJAX."

He also writes

"Is it enough yet to say that Microsoft has an internet strategy? Not quite."

I think he's wrong there. They are just not spelling it out for us. The strategy is to reshape the Internet in their image. You know that emerging Internet operating system everyone is talking about? Well it will look like Minority Report. Just watch their intro graphics with people standing around touching holograms. And it will all be running on XAML and .NET.

These are the first pieces of the platform that will make Google Docs look like the shadow of an office suite that it is.