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Show HN: North Carolina's interactive social media archive

nc.gov.archivesocial.com

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Re: Show HN: North Carolina's interactive social media archive

#13

Post by 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

Re: Show HN: North Carolina's interactive social media archive

#15

Post by anilchawla »

rclabo wrote: post #13

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

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.

Re: Show HN: North Carolina's interactive social media archive

#16

Post by anilchawla »

rguynn wrote: post #14

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.

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 :)

Re: Show HN: North Carolina's interactive social media archive

#18

Post by anilchawla »

mitalpatel83 wrote: post #17

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

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.

Re: Show HN: North Carolina's interactive social media archive

#19

Post by 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.
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