You have no reason to believe anything I have to say about ThinkUp, the personal analytics tool that “gives you insights about your social networks that you can’t find anywhere else.” Its founders Anil Dash and Gina Trapani are friends of mine; they work regularly with Matt Jacobs, another close friend and my co-conspirator on Kidpost; and last year, I spent some weeks helping them design the basis for the service’s current interface. In short, I’m biased.
That said I am sincere when I say that each morning, when I wake up, my favorite morning email and the first one I check is my daily ThinkUp digest, which summarizes all of the insights that ThinkUp has mined for me by scanning my Twitter and Facebook accounts. I read through the email quickly and tap through to see my ThinkUp stream—which is publicly viewable, by the way, and looks like this.
There’s always something genuinely interesting there, whether it’s which of my recent tweets has the most retweets and favorites; interesting new people who have recently started following me; how many times I posted to Facebook last week (not that much; I basically just use Facebook to test Kidpost); or what my most popular tweet was two years ago. I’ve watched these insights get progressively better over the past nine months or so, too, and as the service matures I find it more and more valuable all the time.
Now, happily, ThinkUp has introduced 14-day free trials for new users—the company has always charged for the service, so the barrier to entry has been higher than most social media products. So, assuming you have every reason to doubt my endorsement, you can now find out firsthand how terrific it is. Then you can come back and tell me how right I am.
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