Over the last year hashtagsocialmedia.com has grown and grown and we are attempting to match that growth with new and useful features. So here is the rundown:

Hosting Platform

Last year we were plagued by server and hosting issues causing the site to crash too often whenever traffic would spike. There is nothing wrong with this particular host. They just were not the right tool for the job and as our demands grew they just could not keep up. It happens.

In January We moved out Hosting over to Media Temple and it has been a huge improvement. So far we have not exceeded our resources even during our busiest events without affecting the site performance.

New Twitter Integration

A few new Twitter features and a few more to come:

• Twitter sign in through  Oauth
  • Users can now sign in through Oauth on our Live page or any of the event pages. This will let users Follow and favorite and participate in events directly from hashtagsocialmedia.com
    

• Filtering the #socialmedia noise
  • As the use of #socialmedia hastag grew we got so much spam that the we needed a way to filter the spam out. So we added the “Filter the #SocialMedia Noise” option to bot the live and event archive pages.So now when viewing the archives you can get a clean organized transcript of the event with the moderator highlighted for readability

    
    

    
    

    
    

• Follow users on twitter directly through the live and events page
  • When you sign in with twitter on hashtagsocialmedia.com you can now easily  follow people right from the archive page without leaving the site

    
    

    
    

    
    

• Thumbs Up Feature
  • This is a ratings feature. As the events wrap up we want to be able to highlight the most insightful tweets and report them back.  Right now this feature is 100% user powered so we need your help to mine out the most valuable points in each discussion. All you have to do is click the thumbs up icon and it will increase that point value for that tweet. You can give the “Thumbs Up” during the live events or when reading back through the transcript of an archived event.

    
    

    
    

    
    

• “The Big Follow”
  • This was just added yesterday and it is one of the features we are most excited about. “The Big Follow” button will be displayed on the event archive pages, but only if you are signed in through twitter Oauth, When you click “The Big Follow” your will automatically follow all of the participants of this event on twitter. This is a great feature as everyone that participates in the weekly chats are professionals trying to advance the world of business in social media. So you can easily follow a quality list of professionals on twitter.

    
    

• Profile Pages
  • We have added profile pages so that users can look back on what other users have tweeted in previous events. So if you are following the live events on Tuesdays you can easily click the profile button and get an overview of that persons activity in the #socialmedia twitter events.

Sorting Features on the Event Archive Pages

Last week we added some basic sorting features for viewing the archived twitter events. When and event transcript you can now sort the event ascending or descending based on the time of the tweet. In other words you can read the event forwards or backwards. We also added a requested  staggered chat view that may be easier to read for some.

New Ways to Connect

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn <– Just Added

Iphone App

A couple weeks ago our iPhone app was accepted into the iTunes store. It is a free app and provides some simple and useful features. We often hear that people can not participate because they are not at the office or in front of the computer for one reason or another and this app may solve that problem for some.

1. Read the Latest Blog Entries
2. Follow the Live #sm twitter events from anywhere –
3. Participate in the live twitter event by replying or re-tweeting
4. Follow the schedule of upcoming events

One Year Anniversary

Finally we have our 52nd event coming up in just a couple of weeks. A solid year of  hosting events every week. Congrats to Jason Breed and Marc Meyer for making it happen each week.

When we started the #socialmedia Tuesday discussions there really wasn’t a whole lot of use of the #socialmedia hashtag on twitter. As we and others used it more and more, spammers have jumped in and now the #socialmedia hashtag is flooded with #socialmedia tweets

Since March 23rd 2009 we have been capturing every #socialmedia tweet to  that has been tweeted. You can see in the graph below that the general use of #socialmedia has grown substantially.  No longer just a little spike on Tuesdays, all week long there is #socialmedia activity.

So far we have captured 271, 500 #socialmedia tweets. However the pace of tweets is increasing quickly and we have capture over 50,000 #socialmedia tweets in just the last 30 days.

All of these tweets have been made by a total of 46,781 twitterers

As a result  the hashtagsocialmedia.com website has gained more attention and you can see the increase in unique IPs in the graph below.

To be fair, our system has capture tweets on days when twitter users have been hacked/hijacked as well as days when the Twitter API failed to produce results. So considering these anomalies we have a pretty accurate picture of the use of #socialmedia.com.

I wonder if there are any other hashtags on twitter used as much and for so many months consistently as #socialmedia.

This week was busy. What started as a simple question, “Can we use the Twitter API to create useful twitter events?” turned into a week of marathon coding to see an idea come to fruition. Enter hashtagscoialmedia.com (#socialmedia). #Socialmedia is a site that offers a window in to the hashtag social media. It creates an organized, automatically updating experience  to follow the social media discussion on Twitter. #SocialMedia will also host weekly events for all to participate. We will record those events for reference and encourage feedback for future events. Head over to hashtagsocialmedia.com next Tuesday at noon to join the social media discussion.

There are still a few bugs to work out and features to add, but why hold back a good idea.

AheadofIdeas.com was just launched by Dan Bevarly. The blog will focus on the use of technology to power governement, governent 2.0, citizen engagement and more.

Good luck Dan.