

Show HN: EdgeKick, real-time analytics for public Facebook pages - akane
http://www.edgekick.com/

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brntn
Quick bugfix: It only seems to work if you include the "www." in the URL of
the page. Why not just ask for the page-slug instead of the full URL?

EDIT: I can see this being really useful in a "opposition research" sort of
way. It would be great to be able to view/compare multiple pages at the same
time, and then try to highlight where one is going better than the other.

For pages that you manage, it's really not _that_ useful when compared to the
powerful analytics Facebook already provides through the insights tool.

~~~
akane
I thought the full URL was easiest since you can copy and paste. For pages
that are already being watched, the slug will take you to the page. However,
some fb pages don't have vanity urls.

Edit: thanks for the feedback. Adding the ability to compare your page to
competitors would be pretty nice.

~~~
brntn
That's a fair call, though it's pretty easy to check if "facebook" is in the
submitted string and then check if it's a page slug if it's not.

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the_bear
Seems pretty cool, but the main graph at the top doesn't seem like a very
helpful way to visualize data. It seems safe to assume that the vast majority
of Facebook pages gain likes over time, and the graph has lower and upper
bounds that are very close to those of the data which means you'll pretty much
always have the same graph on every page. It doesn't really tell me anything.

For example, I just clicked on the first six reports you link to on your
landing page, and the graph looks the same for all of them.

Other than that, this looks pretty handy. Thanks.

~~~
akane
I see what you mean. Something like % fans talking about the page would be
more useful.

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grakic
Facebook sometimes shows the cached public page, so the data you are grabbing
may jump around.

Example: <http://www.dodaj.rs/f/2X/72/1YrHKUTF/edgekick.png>

Maybe you can add some smoothing in the graph being shown. According to FB
insights this page got 5 likes in the morning, and there are no unlikes. If
you visit public page, it will show +/- 5, but when logged in to the FB
insights dashboard it is consistent at the top value.

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pork
What exactly are you offering here -- a scraping and archival service? I'm
presuming you're claiming "real-time" because Facebook page insights are
already real-time [1], and you periodically scrape and archive that data [2]?

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/26/facebook-insights-real-
time...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/26/facebook-insights-real-time/) [2]
<http://graph.facebook.com/waltdisneyworld>

~~~
akane
FB reports analytics in realtime, but not all social analytics companies fetch
them multiple times an hour. It's impossible to get insights for a page
without the owner's access token, so this just uses public data. Also, FB
doesn't show how long posts are active, which I find most interesting.

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slig
I can't see the analytics of my fan page. The error I'm getting is: "We cannot
find a Facebook page with this link.".

~~~
akane
What's the URL?

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jessexoc
<https://www.facebook.com/JB.HiFi.Official> is not working for me.

~~~
akane
Fixed. Hope you find the site helpful.
<http://www.edgekick.com/fb/jbhifiofficial>

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halayli
updated every 10 minutes != Real-time

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kaka189
Awesome work, but i guess you are tracking only few top pages. Cannot find
back in time analytics even for pages with a couple of million likes.

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brianbreslin
Probably too many and no easy way of finding them all to scan them all

~~~
kaka189
yes, i can imagine how difficult it is to fetch millions of pages given the
strict rate limits

~~~
akane
You're both correct. I just added 150 pages that I found interesting to get
started.

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nedwin
This is pretty good. What's the game plan with it?

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nedwin
We've used a whole heap of tools to try to track brand pages and it's always a
pain the arse. No one has a clean interface like this and guys like
SocialBakers charge like a wounded bull.

~~~
akane
Glad you like the interface. I tried to keep it simple.

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kyriakos
so what exactly does it do after i enter a URL? is it continuously scraping
and gathering data to populate the graph? if that's the case, thanks cause
this is a good tool to spy on my competition :)

~~~
akane
Exactly. In addition to seeing how long your posts are active and which post
types perform the best, you can learn a lot about your competition (or any
other public page you're interested in)

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morturus
not working, i keep getting "We cannot find a Facebook page with this link."

if i add an "s" to http, i get "Sorry, we are over capicity. Please try again
later."

Any ideas? slug is estrela10

~~~
akane
Is this page public? <http://graph.facebook.com/estrela10> returns false.

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jessexoc
It would be cool if this could overlay charts from different brands.

~~~
akane
Thanks for the feedback.

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amirmansour
Great work, but how is this real-time?

~~~
akane
Since FB doesn't provide a push API for analytics, the best we can do is poll.
I felt that 10 minutes gives an accurate picture of the like/comment/share
trajectory for posts.

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Pratheeswaran
love @ first sight :)

btw how did you generate those nice charts?

~~~
jamongkad
I'm curious as well...and while I'm at it do you store the analytics in a db?

~~~
akane
Nothing special about the db - just PostgreSQL on Heroku

