Show HN: North Carolina's interactive social media archive

http://nc.gov.archivesocial.com

by anilchawla • 14 years ago

30 25 14 years ago

nc.gov.archivesocial.com

anilchawla8• 14 years ago

Some background: We launched this archive with the State of North Carolina yesterday. As far as we know, North Carolina is the first government in the world to make web 2.0 records available to the public in this type of extremely searchable, highly interactive fashion. I say "interactive" in reference to the fact that the records look and behave like the original social network. For example, you can expand comments on Facebook posts, view full-sized photos, expand shortened Twitter links, etc.

I'd love to get your feedback on the presentation of data and the usability of the search interface (I recommend clicking on some of the "Example Searches" to see how it works). I'm happy to speak to the underlying technology as well.

navditt• 14 years ago

Really cool Anil! I can see this dramatically reducing the time it takes and the costs incurred for a government's response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

anilchawla8• 14 years ago

I appreciate it, and you are exactly right. Most governments take anywhere between two to 10 days to even acknowledge a FOIA request. If they are doing anything about social media, then they have to scour through folders of screenshots to find the "record".

shantheman• 14 years ago

Congrats, Anil!

akwales• 14 years ago

Congrats Anil! We're excited for ArchiveSocial's progress!

Cblinks• 14 years ago

Anil your representing RTP well!!

ahoughton• 14 years ago

It's easy to see the commercial value here. Saves time, saves tons of hassle, creates more transparency. Raises the question... why are so many people talking about "Trout Fishing" in North Carolina :)

anilchawla8• 14 years ago

Ha, thanks for the comment. Funny seeing searches for "trout fishing" increasing on our realtime web analytics :) Speaking of which, we are pretty interested in things like trending topics so that you can see what citizens in a particular geography are discussing. This is a bit different -- and in many ways, more interesting -- than what Twitter does today in regards to trending topics based on location, because discussion on government social networking sites is actually about the region itself.

zackmansfield• 14 years ago

incredibly cool to see this live and makes you realize the market potential.

abecrystal• 14 years ago

great stuff, Anil!

ryanbutcher• 14 years ago

This is a great space for growth; FOIA is getting more and more important and granular across all government. Well done

abhivm• 14 years ago

Congratulations, Anil. This is great for both the Government agencies and tax payers.

-Abhi

rclabo• 14 years ago

Hey Anil, I read somewhere that the way ArchiveSocial does the archiving it somehow preserves that info so that it looks just like it did when originally posted on facebook, twitter or wherever. That's kinda hard to imagine. How does it maintain the look of the particular social media environment the content was posted in?

-Ron Clabo

anilchawla8• 14 years ago

Ron, to clarify, we do present the information back in a way that mimics the original social network, but we don't actually preserve the content pixel-by-pixel. We actually preserve the raw metadata and recreate the look, feel, and behavior. This is in contrast to many other tools that simply capture the HTML presentation from Facebook.com and Twitter.com, but not the underlying data. Our view is that the content should feel very familiar to the user, but that the underlying record and metadata are actually what matters.

rguynn• 14 years ago

Incredibly valuable tool. I can see financial companies jumping on this to fill compliance needs if and when they let their reps use social media.

anilchawla8• 14 years ago

Definitely. Financial Services is the flagship market for a solution like this due to SEC and FINRA compliance requirements around record keeping. Imagine not being able to use Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn unless you are able to keep records of every interaction for 5 years in a tamper-proof, non-erasable format :)

mitalpatel83• 14 years ago

Very cool to see North Carolina lead the way in implementation of products like Archive Social.

Seems like an easy technology to build, but it doesn't look like your team has taken any short cuts.

Kudos

anilchawla8• 14 years ago

I appreciate the comment. You are right that, on the surface, this is something fairly easy to say you are doing. There are lots of tools like Backupify, etc that store social media content in some way. The problem is that its virtually impossible to make sense of the data later on because most of the context is lost (i.e. comments are not associated with their posts, you cant view the full-sized photos, etc). It's also a challenge to preserve these ever-changing, non-standardized data formats over the course of several years, while maintaining searchability and accurate presentation of the data.

romitgj• 14 years ago

Great stuff Anil! I think this nails the archival piece of social data. How can this be extended to use the archived data for insights i.e. run data mining algorithms (think SAS on social data). There are few players in that field but if both of these utilities can be coupled, this will be a powerful tool.

anilchawla8• 14 years ago

Agreed. We have some really exciting ideas on how to derive value out of this data, now that we have it in this form. I am curious what kind of analytics you think might be useful to government agencies or companies keeping this data for legal reasons?

adeloso• 14 years ago

Where is the CA social media archive?

pagek• 14 years ago

Really, with all the social media companies in San Francisco, I'm surprised a company from NC did this first.

anilchawla8• 14 years ago

Lots of innovation over here in NC :) I suppose most folks are working on the "sexy" side of social media (i.e. marketing/engagement). There are some compliance-oriented startups in the valley, but nothing quite like this that we know of. I guess you could draw some parallels to services like Cue on the consumer side. Maybe some other folks here on HN know better?

And yes, we'd love to be the archive for CA (or SF for that matter).

daveonbelay• 14 years ago

This makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see if this has even more value during emergencies and severe weather when normal citizens have to pull their resources.

- Dave Hadden

eburwell• 14 years ago

Great work Anil. I did a quick search on beer brewing (near and dear to my heart) and found great government information from legal quantity to some local resources. This site will be valuable if I ever develop a recipe that I will want to sell. Do yo have any plans to do cross search to set up a regional type archive. For example, if I wanted to sell my beer in adjoining states such as VA and SC.

-Esther

Show HN: North Carolina's interactive social media archive

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