Press Army Development Blog

We closed the Press Army Alpha system today to prepare for the upcoming Beta version. They were available longer than we had originally planned so users could continue to play with the data a little longer.

The Beta is almost ready to roll, but we have a few things we want to have right on the new system before opening it up.

Our status right now is that we are testing a couple of key projects on Press Army aimed to give a good sampling of the kinds of uses the we first expect users to want. We are making some adjustments on the fly for those and when the adjustments are ready we will send out all the Beta invitations to our first guinea pigs.

Previous Alpha users will recieve an account on the new Beta version, however the site is a different beast now , and as such all the data is shaped differently and you will be collecting data again from scratch. The best part of that is that your data will now be private to you, so you can collect information without anyone else looking over your shoulder.

We are pretty excited about the new version on its way and hope to let you all in soon.

It’s been nice knowing you Alpha Press Army, but really it is time for us to move on.

We have been working hard on the Beta version of Press Army for a little while now and are finally getting close to being able to release it. This is super exciting for us here at Press Army HQ.

What this means is that we are taking down the Alpha version in anticipation of the new release. Due to how much the concept and structure has evolved we are doing this now instead of letting it continue to run in its current form.

All accounts on the Alpha will be re-activated on the new Beta version but you will find that your projects are reset, meaning you will need to start collecting information on them again. This is because we are collecting a lot more information on social media items now and to be sure all the data in the system is compatible and complete, it is safest to clear the items.

We have cleared up the structure a bit and focussed the project around three phases of understanding social media… Find, Classify, Analyse.

Some things to expect in the new release…

1. Projects now become private … keep your own personal lists
2. Proactive search based on your criteria … searched daily
3. Micro-blogging media type added (includes Twitter)
4. Analytics charts added, including media comparison and reach analysis.
5. Questions added that can be applied to all of your media items

We will do a complete rundown and explanation of the new features and structure when they release.

The Alpha site will be offline as of late today (Monday 26th) Tokyo time, and we will send out a follow up message as soon as the Beta is going. Everyone who already has a Alpha account will automatically have an account set on the new Beta release.

We are learning a lot about how people want to use Press Army from the first version we have been testing with a limited number of users (thanks everyone!). We have confirmed some thoughts and changed some of our thinking based on the user feedback already and I think it is getting better ad better every day as a result. We hope to release some of the updates to the site soon.

A couple of trends we are seeing :

• People mostly want to monitor their own site and the sites of their competitors as opposed to the sites they are just fans of.
• People’s needs are more personal than the public wiki-like format of collecting press, and they want their own private lists as well as the more public side to aid promotion.

A couple of things we want to know :

• How much do people want to collect data themselves? (vs having someone/something else do it for them)
• What extra information do people want to know about the press that discusses them? (ie. it was positive/negative, it was a spam site, etc)

We will talk more about Press Army at the next Tokyo2point0 which is coming up next Tuesday evening at Fujimamas, Harajuku, Tokyo.

Hi everyone and welcome to the Press Army development blog.

Press Army is developed here at UltraSuperNew Inc. as one of our internal development projects. We are an Interactive Creative Agency, based in the heart of Tokyo.

Our goal for this blog is to communicate about how we are evolving the Press Army website and hear the feedback from users and potential users.

Along with this blog we will be available to talk to in person each month at Tokyo2point0, a networking event based at Fujimamas in Tokyo. Each month we will present some of the latest developments and have an open discussion about the development of the site.

The goal of Press Army is to give you the tools to understand your impact in social media. A free service allows you to search and collect and manage social media items and then provides feeds for you to then republish your feeds in other services such as your own website press page or other publicly available information hubs.

A paid version will also be later launched that allows extensive analysis of social media impact. This version will targeted at brand managers and web masters who need to drive and understand the online presence of their brand or website.

To give you a bit of a rundown of where we are at so far,

• We develop with the Symfony php framework
• We host with Amazon EC2
• The project is currently in Japanese and English
• All up 9 people are involved in the development (but not everybody all the time)

Our main development language is English so you may find that most of the conversation here is in English, but we are also happy to chat to you in Japanese (or even French if you prefer). We may not always do multiple language posts, but we will whenever time permits.