Our Approach to Social Media Archiving

Arkovi for social media archiving was just a glimmer in mid-2009 as we tossed around ideas about how we could aggregate our social media footprint for our own content management uses. Our backgrounds in financial services certainly influenced our view of the archiving component - but we needed more flexibility. As we shared some prototyping with peers, we quickly discovered where our focus should be - how to stay out of the way of ourselves and our users.

In our view, the models for archiving data have been strong on the back end - gathering, analyzing, categorizing and storing. Where archiving has often missed the mark is a friendly approach to catering to the ultimate beneficiary - the user (including ourselves!). As we hope you have discovered for those in the private and public beta phases - Arkovi seeks to be friendly on all fronts:

• Archiving - ease of registration and authorizing accounts, adding streams,
• An interactive archive that is search-able, can be filtered and with a presentation that is easy to visually follow with live links,
• The ability to find and reuse content from your archive, from re-posting to Twitter direct to exporting for use in other formats
• The ability to easily add and edit sources of online content (blogs, social profiles, Twitter accounts, RSS feeds, etc),
• Take your data with you via an export feature.

As we work through our final public beta phase - we are not only tweaking features we now have, but also adding some final touches for our transition to full production (slated for February 1). Those include:

• Facebook integration
• Expanded analytics and search
• Enterprise dashboards
• and some more versatile capabilities.

A development note: While we have spent a lot of time on what we call the big four - archiving Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and RSS sources - we are by no means going to ignore the larger social field. We were driven to start here based on evaluation of user levels and page views on social sites and early beta feedback (the RSS feature came from you!). As we complete interfaces - we will be looking to the popularity stats of social sites and your feedback to drive the next waves of feature and function.

Perhaps most important is our focus on staying out of your way as you use the system. Some principles we have established to better serve you:

• “Pick a Major” - we are first and foremost, an archiving solution for social media (blogs, social media sites, community sites, etc.)
• Flexibility - enable users to aggregate and archive, filter and search, email or export and use their social footprint and content how they see fit
• Integrate - enable users that choose to use other user interfaces for interacting with their content to leverage Arkovi as a conduit. We archive your sources then route the data where you need it to be
• Play Well with Others - this ties into the previous two concepts. Seek out opportunities to integrate with “archivers” for email and other data sources not related to social media and explore opportunities to connect with complimentary platforms (CRM, reporting, analytics, publishing clients and platforms and more).
• Economical and Scalable - have a platform that includes a free offering, a premium solution for individuals and small business and an enterprise tier for larger organizations

We hope this introduces you a little bit to what we think about while we are building, evolving and servicing you and the Arkovi platform. As always - we invite your feedback and suggestions!

• Contact Arkovi via email
• Follow, monitor and interact with us on Twitter
• Review Arkovi on oneforty.com
• Friend and follow Arkovi on Facebook

Tags: Archiving, Facebook, Integration, Sharing, Statistics, Twitter