It’s about that time. Time to lay out what we’ve been up to since our last post. It’s been a while; we know it and it’s no OK with us. Why the blackout? A ton of new customers, continued product enhancements and infrastructure upgrades have had everyone juggling fire. We don’t like burns so unfortunately the blog has taken a back seat. Now that the acrobatics are over, we’ve got a bunch to share. Let’s get to it.

Speed of the Link Buzzmarker

If you’re using BuzzStream for Link Management, you’ll see huge improvements in the time it takes for the Link Buzzmarker to scan the page.  This will make your link research and link documentation efforts much more efficient.  I was testing sites last night that had been taking 10-15 seconds to load and they’re now loading in 2 to 3 seconds.  We’ll make similar improvements to the Media Buzzmarker in a future release.  This will be a continuous process…the end goal is to get it to where there’s virtually no wait time when you click the Buzzmarker.

Tag Management

One of our most frequent requests from people who have been using the product for a long time is that tags quickly become unmanageable once you have a lot of contacts or a lot of people using the product.  We’ve taken the first step to addressing this by adding tag management capabilities.  Now you can select multiple contacts and add, edit or delete contacts for those contacts.  So suppose one person was using the tag “social media” and another person was using “social_media,” you can now fix this by filtering on the tag you want to remove, selecting all the contacts, removing the one tag and adding the other.

Enhancements to Tasks

We continue to extend our Task Management capabilities so that you can better track and manage your influencer outreach efforts and your link management activities.   Here’s a list of the things we added since our last Release blog post:

• The ability to add a task while Buzzmarking a contact
• E-mail notifications of your daily agenda as well as notifications when tasks are assigned to you by someone else
• The ability to add follow-up tasks when you’re adding notes, editing links, etc (for example, after adding the note “Talked to John about the product review,” you can create a follow-up task titled “Send screenshots” that’s associated with the note)
• Task filtering on the Dashboard – this will enable you to see tasks associated with a specific project, tasks that are due at a certain time, and tasks that are assigned to someone on your team.

Bulk Operations

In addition to Tag Management, we’ve added  a number of other operations that can be conducted on multiple contacts at once.  This is particularly useful when you’re working with a large number of contacts.  Our bulk operations currently include:

• Select specific contacts to copy or move to a different project: you no longer have to move/copy all of the Link Partners that are in the current filter…now you can specifically select the ones that you want to copy or move.
• Bulk delete
• Ability to change the “assigned to” field for multiple Link Partners at once
• Ability to change “relationship stage” for multiple Link Partners at once

Improvements to Search

We implemented Lucene as our search technology, which will give us much more power for searching.  In the near-term, this means you can now search on any term in the fields we look at.  In the long-term, it’ll mean that we’ll be able to search across much larger data sets.  This will become much more important as we enhance our influencer monitoring capabilities (i.e., you’ll be able to do things like look for any of your influencers who have written about a certain topic in the last X weeks).

Improved Performance

We added a number of large customers last week and we’re optimizing to make sure that performance keeps up.  We’re addressing this both with code optimizations and by adding more hardware.  Things seem to be humming, but please let us know if you see any issues.

Usability Improvements and Bug Fixes

In addition to these new features, we also made a number of usability improvements and fixed some remaining bugs.  Here’s the list:

• The Quick Search box now clears when you click “Clear Filters”
• For monitoring, the “Manage” tab is only available to Administrators
• Fixed a bug that was preventing retrieval of Twitter metrics when you’d click “Update Metrics”
• Links to external websites now open in a new tab (instead of a new window)
• Fixed a bug that was making some social profile URLs unclickable (e.g., some facebook URL formats)
• When you click outside the Projects drop-down, it now closes automatically
• When you finish an Import, the “Cancel” button now changes to “Close”
• Increased the character limit for the “About” fields on People, Media Outlets and Link Partners
• Fixed a set of user interface bugs on Internet Explorer.  These include:
  • Cursor wouldn’t turn into a pointer when you hovered over the Delete icon
  • “Link out” icons were getting cut off on some pages
  • Text in “Recently Viewed” section of the Dashboard was getting cut off

Lots of tasty goodness in our near-term roadmap as well…some of the things we’re working on:

• Reporting: our highest priority for our next major release
• Filter memory: BuzzStream will remember your filter.  So, for example, suppose you’ve filtered your list to only show contacts assigned to you.  If you go to a different page or log out, the next time you return to the list, you’ll only see those contacts (this is a first step towards Saved Filters).
• Highlighting contact info found by the Buzzmarker: When you Buzzmark a page, we’ll  highlight the section of the web page where any contact info is found.  This will reduce the time required for research.
• Complete upgrade of the Backlink Checker e-mail in the Link Management product
• More bulk operations