Gina Trapani has a new project up.
It's called ThinkUp, and it calls itself a nice way for you to learn more about your social conversations. Ohloh notes that it is mostly written in PHP and has a large, active development team. It should, as Trapani notes it's a tool the White House uses.
But don't rush out and download it to your laptop. This is server software. You also need to expose a local development server for the Internet to get started with it, as Twitter requires a public callback URL. Configuration also requires plug-ins.
What I'm really saying is this is corporate software. It's limited in its reach to those enterprises that can devote server and programming resources to it.
Nothing wrong with that. Lots of organizations are scaled to that degree. The program's blog notes theit Github site is now getting over 83,000 pushes of new code each weekday, representing over 400,000 commits, and the weekend traffic is now where the weekday traffic was a year ago.
Lots of people, or would it be more proper to say lots of "people."
While the Supreme Court ruled today that corporations do not have "personal privacy" the way people do, for the purpose of refusing Freedom of Information Act requests, they are considered individuals under the law. That's how they were able to destroy campaign reform — even campaign transparency — last year.
(If all you know of George Bernard Shaw is Pygmalion, you don't know Shaw. Try his Man and Superman, in this handy BBC audio version. From Dame Judi Dench.)
Corporations have been considered people ever since a Supreme Court clerk, in 1884, tossed a footnote into an unrelated Southern Pacific tax case, creating what is now called corporate personhood. They are not men, but supermen, because they cannot be jailed, nor killed by lethal injection, and their interests do not die with any one individual, but are instead immortal (since their rights can be transferred to another corporation even if the first fails).
There are other supermen among us. Nearly any scaled organization has some of the rights, and powers, of corporations. Most especially they have the power to do big things, and track lots of activity, to find out what everyone else is thinking about them.
I learn what people are thinking about me via Tweetdeck. Most people can track what other individuals, or organizations, are saying about them on public social networks with such tools.
But corporations, and all scaled organizations, can use tools like ThinkUp. They can analyze themselves, and analyze us, see us as groups even if we can't see them. Unless, that is, we become part of something larger ourselves. A company like AOL, or The Washington Post, can mount ThinkUp on its servers and give employees access to this power.
Or we could build it into a public Web site.
Which is something I recommend heartily.
