anilchawla

ArchiveSocial - Durham, NC - On-site only

We automate record keeping, monitoring, & analytics of social media to help organizations fulfill legal requirements and avoid lawsuits. We build technology that adapts to evolving social networking APIs, manages tens of millions of records, processes content in realtime, and instantly retrieves & replays social media content.

Our customers include San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, and Attorney General of the United States, and we recently received an investment from Steve Case (founder of AOL). We're a team of top ranked ex-IBMers, and we're looking for brilliant engineers of all experience levels who:

* Have a strong CS background

* Like Java, aren't afraid to admit it, and are darn good at it

* Are energized by working across the stack (front end, back end, ...)

* Have experience with technologies including AWS, Apache Storm, Hadoop, Dojo, Play Framework, Ansible, Eclipse

Full posting here: http://archivesocial.com/careers-software-engineer

Our team is growing at a rapid pace primarily based on customer revenue. We are located in the American Underground, which is a Google-sponsored startup hub. Benefits including fully paid medical, open vacation policy, free downtown parking, weekly team lunches, happy hours, lots of opportunities to tell cheesy jokes.

ArchiveSocial - Durham, NC - ONSITE - http://archivesocial.com

We automate record keeping, monitoring, & analytics of social media to help organizations fulfill compliance and legal requirements. Our solution is utilized by hundreds of major govts including San Francisco, Austin, Orlando, and US National Archives, and we recently received an investment from Steve Case (founder of AOL).

We're a team of top ranked ex-IBMers, and we're looking for engineers of all experience levels who:

* Have a strong CS background

* Like Java, aren't afraid to admit it, and are darn good at it

* Are energized by working across the stack (front end, back end, ...)

* Have experience with technologies including AWS, Apache Storm, Hadoop, Dojo, Play Framework, Ansible, Eclipse

Full posting here: http://archivesocial.com/careers-software-engineer

Our team is growing at a rapid pace primarily based on customer revenue. We are located in the American Underground, which is a Google-sponsored startup hub. Benefits including fully paid medical, open vacation policy, free downtown parking, weekly team lunches, happy hours.

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?

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).

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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".

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.

As a founder of one of the companies in this first batch of Triangle Startup Factory, I would highly recommend the program to startups across the country. This is a startup accelerator grounded in core lean principles, and it provides exactly the level of resources (including significant funding and a great mentor base) critical for an early stage company.

Durham (North Carolina) is not just an incredible area to live from a quality of life standpoint, but it also a true center of entrepreneurial activity. Startup Stampede, Smoffice, ExitEvent, LaunchBox Digital (back in 2010), and Triangle Startup Factory (TSF) are just a few examples of the entrepreneurial sparks flying in this place.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about TSF. I am happy to help!

Hmm. You're probably right... still sounds like a win/win/win (if you count the customer that gets their design done and feels good about charity). My wife and I visited Christchurch a little over a year ago. Great town with incredibly friendly people. Glad to see 99designs doing something that will help them.

I think I get his point. Not sure if app/business is the right terminology, but he's distinguishing between: building something "better" VS understanding how and why you will realistically win users/customers.

Great list of additional restrictions/shortcomings. I forgot to mention that you can't post a photo that is hosted on the Facebook CDN - that is really annoying.

Thanks. I'm definitely keeping the code around since it's fully implemented. I might either reduce the scope of the alerts (for example, ignore add/remove and focus on changes only) or just bring it back when I have more confidence in the API.

Ha - ChromeSpeed! Glad to see you have the project page hosted and the video on YouTube. Maybe we should port to iPhone? Definitely an Angry Birds killer... OK, sorry to go off topic, we should catch up offline (or online elsewhere)!

Gotcha. I thought you might report updates only. The problem is that people can also remove their status instead of setting it back to "Single". Focusing on value updates only is probably fine and I'm sure nobody is going to freak out if the app misses a breakup :-P In my case, I was trying to create a more comprehensive notification that covered events such as new relationships (i.e. the user does not have a relationship status and one day finally sets it) and I couldn't afford the false positives.

Right, I also thought I could work around the issues by ignoring fluctuations in the data. The problem is knowing what is the correct baseline data. In your example, the education:concentration might be missing when you first start checking and only start appearing a long time later. Do you ignore the data when it first appears or report that the person just added another major at college (which may be true!)? This is a bigger problem with fields that people might completely add/remove instead of simply updating (e.g. relationship status). I tried baking in a time period (e.g. 24 hours) in which I ignored all changes and waited for the baseline data to become obvious, but even that didn't work because some data took even longer to re-appear. At some point I had to admit to myself that - with all these work-arounds - my simple feature had turned into a hack.

I should say that I've been lurking on HN for quite some time and that this is my first post :-) One motivation for writing this post was that I was surprised to see how often the Facebook API will drop/omit data that exists and that you should be able to access. I specifically call out the Breakup Notifier app (which recently got a ton of buzz) because I don't see how apps like that can report accurate information when the underlying data is unreliable. Any thoughts or similar experiences with the Facebook API?