

Show HN: North Carolina's interactive social media archive - anilchawla
http://nc.gov.archivesocial.com

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anilchawla
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.

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navditt
Really cool Anil! I can see this dramatically reducing the time it takes and
the costs incurred for a government's response to a Freedom of Information Act
request.

~~~
anilchawla
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".

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eburwell
Great work Anil. I did a quick search on beer brewing (near and dear to my
heart) and found great government information from legal quantity to some
local resources. This site will be valuable if I ever develop a recipe that I
will want to sell. Do yo have any plans to do cross search to set up a
regional type archive. For example, if I wanted to sell my beer in adjoining
states such as VA and SC.

-Esther

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rclabo
Hey Anil, I read somewhere that the way ArchiveSocial does the archiving it
somehow preserves that info so that it looks just like it did when originally
posted on facebook, twitter or wherever. That's kinda hard to imagine. How
does it maintain the look of the particular social media environment the
content was posted in?

-Ron Clabo

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anilchawla
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.

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romitgj
Great stuff Anil! I think this nails the archival piece of social data. How
can this be extended to use the archived data for insights i.e. run data
mining algorithms (think SAS on social data). There are few players in that
field but if both of these utilities can be coupled, this will be a powerful
tool.

~~~
anilchawla
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?

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mitalpatel83
Very cool to see North Carolina lead the way in implementation of products
like Archive Social.

Seems like an easy technology to build, but it doesn't look like your team has
taken any short cuts.

Kudos

~~~
anilchawla
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.

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ahoughton
It's easy to see the commercial value here. Saves time, saves tons of hassle,
creates more transparency. Raises the question... why are so many people
talking about "Trout Fishing" in North Carolina :)

~~~
anilchawla
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.

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daveonbelay
This makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see if this has even more
value during emergencies and severe weather when normal citizens have to pull
their resources.

\- Dave Hadden

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rguynn
Incredibly valuable tool. I can see financial companies jumping on this to
fill compliance needs if and when they let their reps use social media.

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anilchawla
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 :)

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ryanbutcher
This is a great space for growth; FOIA is getting more and more important and
granular across all government. Well done

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abhivm
Congratulations, Anil. This is great for both the Government agencies and tax
payers.

-Abhi

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akwales
Congrats Anil! We're excited for ArchiveSocial's progress!

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Cblinks
Anil your representing RTP well!!

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adeloso
Where is the CA social media archive?

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pagek
Really, with all the social media companies in San Francisco, I'm surprised a
company from NC did this first.

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anilchawla
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).

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zackmansfield
incredibly cool to see this live and makes you realize the market potential.

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abecrystal
great stuff, Anil!

