The Server Challenge II “Hall of Fame” was particularly competitive at Interop 2013. Only 8 seconds separated our first place finisher from tenth place:

Jim Chrapowicz recorded the competition-winning time of 58.40 seconds (after a 5-second penalty for not closing one of the latches), edging out the second place time by a razor-thin margin of less than two tenths of a second. For his Server Challenge II heroics, Jim is being rewarded with the MacBook Air grand prize, and everyone who made the top ten list will be receiving $25 iTunes gift cards. Here’s video of the winning completion:

Take a look at some of the other action from the show floor:

About the Server Challenge II

The Server Challenge II is a race to reassemble a scaled-down version of a SoftLayer server rack. Participants are tasked with repopulating the drive bays of two 2U Supermicro servers and plugging 18 network cables into network switches. The competition provides conference attendees with a fun opportunity to get hands-on with the servers and network gear that fuel SoftLayer’s global cloud infrastructure platform. For more information about the Server Challenge II, check out “Server Challenge II: How SoftLayer Saves the World.”

About SoftLayer

SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. Spanning 13 data centers in the United States, Asia and Europe and a global footprint of network points of presence, SoftLayer’s modular architecture provides unparalleled performance and control, with a full-featured API and sophisticated automation controlling a flexible unified platform that seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices, and a global network for secure, low-latency communications. With 100,000 devices under management, SoftLayer is the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider in the world with a portfolio of leading-edge customers from Web startups to global enterprises. For more information, visit softlayer.com.

About Supermicro

Supermicro, the leading innovator in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology is a premier provider of advanced server Building Block Solutions for Data Center, Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, Hadoop/Big Data, HPC and Embedded Systems worldwide. Supermicro is committed to protecting the environment through its “We Keep IT Green” initiative and provides customers with the most energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly solutions available on the market. For more information, visit supermicro.com.

The most important thing to understand when it comes to the way the abuse team handles DMCA complaints is that our procedures aren’t just SoftLayer policy — they are the law. Our role in processing copyright complaints is essentially that of a middleman. In order to protect our Safe Harbor status under the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA), we must enforce any complaint that meets the legal requirements of a takedown notice. That DMCA complaint must contain specific elements and be properly formatted in order to be considered valid.

Responding to a DMCA Complaint

When we receive a complaint that meets the legal requirements of a DMCA takedown notice, we must relay the complaint to our direct customer and enforce a deadline for removal of the violating material. We are obligated to remove access to infringing content when we are notified about it, and we aren’t able to make a determination about the validity of a claim beyond confirming that all DMCA requirements are met.

The law states that SoftLayer must act expeditiously, so if you receive notification of a DMCA complaint, it’s important that you acknowledge the ticket that the abuse department opened on your account and let us know your intended course of action. Sometimes that action is as simple as removing an infringing URL. Sometimes you may need to contact your client and instruct them to take the material down. Whatever the case may be, it’s important to be responsive and to expressly confirm when you have complied and removed the material. Failure to acknowledge an abuse ticket can result in disconnection of service, and in the case of copyright infringement, SoftLayer has a legal obligation to remove access to the material or we face serious liability.

DMCA Counter Notifications

Most DMCA complaints are resolved without issue, but what happens if you disagree with the complaint? What if you own the material and a disgruntled former business partner is trying to get revenge? What if you wrote the content and the complaining party is copying your website? Thankfully there are penalties for filing a false DMCA complaint, but you also have recourse in the form of a counter notification. Keep in mind that while it may be tempting to plead your case to the abuse department, our role is not to play judge or jury but to allow the process to work as it was designed.

In some cases, you may be able to work out a resolution with the complaining party directly (misunderstandings happen, licenses lapse, etc.) and have them send a retraction, but most of the time your best course of action is to submit a counter notification.

Just as a takedown notice must be crafted in a specific way, counter notifications have their own set of requirements. Once you have disabled the material identified in the original complaint, we can provide your valid, properly formatted counter notification to the complaining party. Unless we receive a court order from the complaining party within the legally mandated time frame the material can be re-enabled and the case is closed for the time being.

While it might sound complicated, it’s actually pretty straightforward, but we urge you to do your research and make sure you know what to do in the event a client of yours is hit with a DMCA takedown notice. Just as we are unable to make judgment calls when it comes to takedown notices or counter notifications, we are also unable to offer any legal advice for you if you need help. Hopefully this post cleared up a few questions and misconceptions about how the abuse department handles copyright complaints. In short:

Do take DMCA notifications seriously. You are at risk for service interruption and possible legal liability.
Do respond to the abuse department letting them know the material has been disabled and, if applicable, if you plan to file a counter notification.
Don’t refuse to disable the material. Even if you believe the claim is false and you wish to file a counter notification, the material must be disabled within the time period allotted by the abuse department or we have to block access to it.
Don’t expect the abuse department to take sides.

As with any abuse issue, communication and responsiveness is important. Disconnecting your server is a last resort, but we have ethical and legal obligations to uphold. The DMCA process certainly has its weaknesses and it leaves a bit to be desired, but at the end of the day, it’s the law, and we have to operate inside of our legal obligation to it.

-Jennifer

I first met the wind2share team at TechCrunch SF in the fall of 2012, and I was immediately taken aback by their energy and the genuine kindness they exuded as people. At the time, the team had been slowly making the transition of having employees work in three different cities on two different continents, but it was clear that they shared a unified willingness to work hard and create a meaningful solution for their clients. As my boy Iggy Pop said, they had a “lust for life” that is as magnetic as it is uncommon. And if that weren’t enough, their vision for wind2share is innovative and intriguing:

wind2share is a social business network specially designed for people to make referrals to leading institutions and companies and receive cash rewards based on successful referrals. Businesses seeking to enter new markets can lean on hundreds of ambassadors worldwide to offer their services to new audiences, and expand their client base in new markets.

Since I met them, they’ve made incremental improvements in their user experience, incorporating Facebook and Google+ accounts to streamline signups and launching a new site design to clearly and succinctly convey the business model and the platform’s features.

After a successful pilot run in 2012 which generated more than $1.7 million in revenue, wind2share is strategically ramping up their marketing efforts to continue the viral growth of their disruptive referral model. Given how easy they make the process of connecting and interacting with businesses and top-level professionals around thew world, it’s not a surprise that the startup has been so successful, and I have no doubt that their success will continue.

The beauty of the network wind2share created is the diversity of its functionality. Your social network trusts you, and your referrals are valuable, so wind2share provides a medium for businesses to reward you when you recommend them. Beyond that use-case, if you’re an entrepreneur or you have an idea, you can connect with investors who share your interest and may be of some help. The way I think of it is that it’s a social community with a business purpose. Members are provided with all the information, tools and resources they need to “Make a Wealth of Referrals.”

Companies like wind2share are a glowing successes in our Catalyst. Our team has solved numerous infrastructure challenges for them, and we’ve had the opportunity to make strategic introductions to investors, business leads and potential business partners as the company has grown and matured. Seeing the work pay off in such a positive way with wind2share is proof positive of the value Catalyst provides startups.

To learn more about wind2share or to sign up, head over to wind2share.com. If you’d like to meet the fantastic team of brilliant folks behind the platform, reach out to me directly and I’ll happily start the conversation for you.

-@JoshuaKrammes

This isn’t the first time the advertising-focused crowd at ad:tech has seen the Server Challenge, but with the competition’s new retro arcade game design, it was much more of a focal point this year than it has been in years past … And it didn’t hurt that we were in an awesome location right at the entrance of the expo floor:

Given the fact that most people who stopped at our booth were drawn to us as part of a crowd around the Server Challenge, the first question we heard was subtly different than the “What does SoftLayer do?” question we’re used to answering at ad:tech. This year, most of my conversations started with an attendee asking, “What in the world does this game have to do with SoftLayer?” Luckily, the graphic on the front of the Server Challenge with three simple objectives provides a great outline for the competition’s relevance to our business:

1. Load the Data
2. Connect the Network
3. Save the World

1. Load the Data

Game Application: Insert all 24 of the drive trays into the drive bays of two Supermicro servers.
SoftLayer Significance: We have more than 100,000 Supermicro servers in our 13 data centers around the world. When you walk into one of our facilities in Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Washington, D.C., San Jose, Amsterdam or Singapore, you’ll see racks filled with servers just like the ones in the Server Challenge II, and those servers are loaded up with the hard drives you choose when you order from us.

2. Connect the Network

Game Application: Connect the 18 network cables into the three network switches.
SoftLayer Significance: The three different colors of network cables are the same colors you’ll see in our data centers. The red cables carry public network traffic, the blue cables carry private network traffic, and the green cables carry out-of-band management network traffic. This is a huge differentiator for SoftLayer because those three physical networks allow for much greater flexibility for our customers. While the public network is serving public traffic to your websites, games and apps, you could be running an off-site backup of your database over the private network (where you don’t incur bandwidth charges), and you can manage your server over SSL, PPTP and IPSEC connections via the out-of-band management network carried by the green cables.

3. Save the World

Game Application: Win a MacBook Air!
SoftLayer Significance: SoftLayer provides the flexible, scalable platform on which you can build your application, run your game or push an advertising campaign. The fact that all of our servers are racked, networked and ready for your order means that we’re ready to “Save the World” for you by provisioning on-demand bare metal cloud servers and virtual cloud computing instances.

At least four or five times per show, I hear attendees talking about how the Server Challenge is the most fun game at the conference (even at GDC … where the entire expo hall is filled with gaming companies). While it draws crowds for being fun, the best part of the competition is that it helps us tell our story and creates memories at the same time. When Server Challenge competitors hear that their companies need a new server, they’re going to have a flashback to stepping up to a SoftLayer server rack and learning what makes SoftLayer the best choice as a cloud hosting provider. With the crowds we see at every show, that means we’ve got a lot of future customers:

Thanks to all of the ad:tech attendees who took on the Server Challenge II this year. The show actually had one of the most dramatic conclusions of any we’ve ever had before! Yuki Matsumoto broke the one-minute mark early on Day 2 of the expo with his first attempt of the day, and John Li managed to squeak by him with a time of 0:58.05 less than five minutes before the show floor closed:

Yuki had one shot at redemption as the last competitor of the show, but he wasn’t able to beat John’s 58-second completion, so the MacBook Air went to John Li! Keep practicing your server-building skills and come look for SoftLayer (and the Server Challenge) in an expo hall near you!

-Summer

Before we get too far into the weeds, it’s important to take a step back and understand the Asian culture and how it differs from the business cultures in the West. The Asian market is much more relational than the market in the United States or Europe; significant value is placed on the time you spend in the region building new networks and interacting with other your prospective customers and suppliers. Even for small purchases, businesses in Asia are much more comfortable with face-to-face agreements than they are with phone calls or emails. Many of the executives I speak to about entering Asia argue they don’t have time to spend weeks and months in the region, and they make whistle-stop trips in various countries to get a snapshot of what they need to know to make informed decisions. Their businesses often fail at breaching the market because they don’t invest the time and resources they need to create the relationships required to succeed. Books, blogs (even this one), consultants and occasional visits aren’t nearly as important to your success as investing yourself in the culture. Even if you can’t physically travel to your target market for some reason, find ways to plug into the community online and become a resource.

Asia is not homogenous. There are 20 distinct countries and cultures, dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects. There are distinct legal systems, currencies, regulatory frameworks and cultural norms. From a business perspective, that means that what you do to appeal to an audience in Singapore won’t be as effective for an audience in Japan … This is not the United States of Asia nor is there an Asian Union. Having partners in Hong Kong does not get you into China; if you want to access markets in China, you need to build relationships with partners and customers in China. One of the biggest reasons for this in-country presence to understand and avoid a “death by a thousand cuts” situation where minor, seemingly insignificant questions and problems cumulatively prevent a business from successfully entering the market. Take these questions from customers as an example:

• When I buy from your office in Bangkok, where is the contract jurisdiction?
• I’m in Hong Kong. Can I pay in Hong Kong Dollars? Who takes the currency risk?
• Corporate credit cards aren’t common in Vietnam. Can I pay for my online purchase in cash?
• If I sign up for a webinar, is it at a time convenient for me (i.e. repeated for other time zones), or do I have to be at my PC at 3am?
• If you invite me to a meeting on 12/4, is that April 12th, or December 4th?
• When I print whitepapers from your website, do I need to resize to a different paper size?

The way you handle currencies, time zones and how you present information are barometers of how approachable your business is for users and businesses in a particular market. Most users won’t reach out to you to ask those kinds of questions; they’ll just move on to a competitor who answers their questions without them asking. You learn about these sticking points by having people on the ground and talking to potential customers and partners. Since globalization is “flattening” the World Wide Web, the mechanics of hosting a site, application or game in a data center in Singapore are identical to hosting the same content in Dallas. It’s easy to make your data locally available and have infrastructure available in your target market, but that’s only a start. You need to approach Asian countries as unique opportunities to redefine your business in a way that fits the culture of your potential customers and partners.

In my next blog, I plan to share a few best practices about management, responsiveness and responsibility, positioning, operations and marketing in Asia. These posts are intended to get you thinking about how your business can approach expanding into Asia smartly, and if you have any questions or want any advice about your business in particular, please feel free to email me directly: dwebb@softlayer.com.

-@darylwebb

It’s easy to think about SoftLayer as a pure technology company. We provide infrastructure as a service capabilities for businesses with on-demand provisioning and short-term contracts. Our data centers, portal, network and APIs get the spotlight, but those differentiators wouldn’t exist without the teams of employees that keep improving them on a daily basis. By focusing on the company culture and making sure employees are being challenged (but not overwhelmed), SoftLayer was indirectly improving the infrastructure we provide to customers.

When I walked into the office for my first day of work, I imagined that I’d be working in a cramped, dimly lit room in the back of the building where I’d be using hand-me-down hardware. When I was led to a good-sized, well-lit room and given a Core i3 laptop with two large monitors and a full suite of software, I started realizing how silly my worries were. I had access to the fully stocked break room, and within about a week, I felt like part of a community rather than a stale workplace.

My coworkers not only made me feel welcome but would frequently go out of their way to make sure I am comfortable and have the resources I needed to succeed. While the sheer amount of new information and existing code was daunting, managers assigned projects that were possible to complete and educational. I was doing useful work building and improving a complex production system rather than the busy work offered by many other employers’ internship programs. I learned several new techniques and solidified my understanding of software engineering theory through practice. The open-door policy and friendly people around me not only created a strong sense of community but also allowed more efficient problem solving.

You may have noticed early in this post that I joined the company on a summer internship and that I also told you it’s been about a year since I started. While summers in Texas feel long, they don’t actually last a full year … After my internship, I was offered a part-time position as a software engineer, and I’m going to be full-time when I graduate in May.

It’s next to impossible to find a company that realizes the importance of its employees and wants to provide an environment for employees to succeed. The undeniable runaway success of the company is proof that SoftLayer’s approach to taking care of employees is working.

-John

SoftLayer is able to offer the entrepreneurial community so much more than cloud computing instances and powerful servers. As a startup ourselves not so long ago, our team knows all about the difficulties of being an entrepreneur, and now that we’re able to give back to the startup community, we want to share battle stories and lessons learned. Mentorship is one of the most valuable commodities for entrepreneurs and business founders, and SoftLayer’s mentors are in a unique position to provide feedback about everything from infrastructure planning to hiring your first employees to engaging with your board of advisors to negotiating better terms on a round of funding.

The Catalyst team engages in these kinds discussions with our clients every day, and we’ve had some pretty remarkable success. When we better understand a client’s business, we can provide better feedback and insight into the infrastructure that will help that business succeed. In other words, we build meaningful relationships with our Catalyst clients, and as a result, those clients are able to more efficiently leverage the hosting credits we provide them.

The distinction between Catalyst and other startup programs in the hosting industry has never been so apparent than after South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin this year. I had the opportunity to meet with entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts who have been thirsting for a program like Catalyst for years, and when they hear about what we’re doing, they know they’ve found their oasis. I had a chance to sit down with Paul Ford in the Catalyst Startup Lounge at SXSW to talk about the program and some of the insights and feedback we’d gotten at the show:

Paul was quick to point out that being a leader in the startup community has more impact when you provide the best technology and pair that with a team that can deliver for startups what they need: meaningful support.

Later, I had an impromptu coffee with one of the world’s largest, most prestigious Silicon Valley-based venture capital firms — probably THE most respected venture capital firm in the world, actually. As we chatted about the firm’s seed-funding practices, the investment partner told me, “There is no better insurance policy for an infrastructure company than what SoftLayer is doing to ensure success for its startup clients.” And I thought that was a pretty telling insight.

That simple sentence drove home the point that success in a program like Catalyst is not guaranteed by a particular technology, no matter how innovative or industry-leading that technology may be. Success comes from creating value BEYOND that technology, and when I sat down with George Karidis, he shared a few insights how the Catalyst vision came to be along with how the program has evolved to what it is today:

Catalyst is special. The relationships we build with entrepreneurs are meaningful. We’ve made commitments to have the talented brainpower within our own walls to be accessible to the community already. After SXSW, I knew I didn’t have to compare what we were doing from what other programs are doing because that would be like comparing apples and some other fruit that doesn’t do nearly as much for you as apples do.

I was told once on the campaign trail for President Clinton in ’96 that so long as you have a rock-solid strategy, you cannot be beaten if you continue to execute on that strategy. Execute, Execute, Execute. If you waiver and react to the competition, you’re dead in the water. With that in mind, we’re going to keep executing on our strategy of being available to our Catalyst clients and actively helping them solve their problems. The only question that remains is this:

How can we help you?

-@JoshuaKrammes

By merging our two iOS applications into a single, universal app, we can provide better feature parity, maintain coherent architecture and increase code reuse and maintainability because we’re only working with a single feature-rich binary app that provides a consistent user experience on the iPhone and the iPad at the same. Obviously, this meant we had to retool much of the legacy iPhone-specific SoftLayer Mobile app in order to provide the same device-specific functionality we had for the iPad in SoftLayer Mobile HD, but I was surprised at how straightforward that process ended up being. I thought I’d share a few of the resources iOS includes that simplify the process of creating a universal iOS application.

iOS supports development of universal applications via device-specific resource loading and device-specific runtime checks, and we leveraged those tools based on particular situations in our code base.

Device-specific resource loading allows iOS to choose the appropriate resource for the device being used. For example, if we have two different versions of an image called SoftLayerOnBlack.png to fit either an iPhone or an iPad, we simply call one SoftLayerOnBlack~iphone.png and call the other one SoftLayerOnBlack~ipad.png. With those two images in our application bundle, we let the system choose which image to use with a simple line of code:

UIImage* image = [UIImage imageNamed: @"SoftLayerOnBlack.png"];

In addition to device-specific resource loading, iOS also included device-specific runtime checks. With these runtime checks, we’re able to create conditional code paths depending on the underlying device type:

if (UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPad) {
    // The device is an iPad running iOS 3.2 or later.
} else {
    // The device is an iPhone or iPod touch.
}

These building blocks allow for a great deal of flexibility when it comes to creating a universal iOS application. Both techniques enable simple support based on what device is running the application, but they’re used in subtly different ways. With those device-specific tools, developers are able to approach their universal applications in a couple of distinct ways:

Device-Dependent View Controller:
If we want users on the iPhone and iPad applications to have the same functionality but have the presentation tailored to their specific devices, we would create separate iPhone and iPad view controllers. For example, let’s look at how our Object Storage browser appears on the iPhone and the iPad in SoftLayer Mobile:

We want to take advantage of the additional real estate the iPad provides, so at runtime, the appropriate view controller is be selected based on the devices’ UI context. The technique would look a little like this:

@implementation SLMenuController
...
 
- (void) navigateToStorageModule: (id) sender {
	UIViewController<SLApplicationModule> *storageModule = nil;
    if (UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPad) {
        storageModule = [SLStorageModule_iPad storageModule];
    } else {
        storageModule = [SLStorageModule storageModule];
    }
    [self navigateToModule: storageModule];
}	
...
@end

“Universal” View Controller
In other situations, we didn’t need for the viewing experience to differ between the iPhone and the iPad, so we used a single view controller for all devices. We don’t compromise the user experience or presentation of data because the view controller either re-scales or reconfigures the layout at runtime based on screen size. Take a look at the “About” module on the iPhone and iPad:

The code for the universal view controller of the “About” module looks something like this:

@implementation SLAboutModuleNavigationViewController
…
 
- (id) init {
    self = [super init];
    if (self) {
      _navigationHidden = YES;
		_navigationWidth = [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds].size.width * 0.5;
    }
    return self;
}
…
@end

There are plenty of other iOS features and tricks in the universal SoftLayer Mobile app. If you’ve got a SoftLayer account and an iOS devices, download the app to try it out and let us know what you think. If you were a SoftLayer Mobile HD user, do you notice any significant changes in the new app from the legacy app?

-Pawel

P.S. If you’re not on iOS but you still want some SoftLayer love on your mobile device, check out the other SoftLayer Mobile Apps on Android and Windows Phone.

Lesson 1: The founders must be committed to the success of their venture.
Joining an accelerator or incubator comes with some strings attached — startups give up between 6 to 10 percent of their equity in exchange for some cash and structured program that usually lasts around three months. Obviously, this kind of commitment should not be taken lightly.

Too often, startups join accelerator programs before they are ready or mature enough as a team. Sometimes, a company’s idea isn’t fully baked, so they end up spending as much time “creating” their business as they do “accelerating” it. As a result, that company isn’t able to leverage an accelerator’s resources efficiently throughout the entire program … The founders need to establish a vision for the business, begin laying the groundwork for the company’s products and services, and be 100% committed to the accelerator program before joining. If you can’t say with confidence that your startup meets all three of those requirements, don’t do it. Take care of those three points and proceed to the next lesson.

Lesson 2: Be prepared to leverage what you are given.
Many startups join accelerator and incubator programs with unrealistic expectations. Participation in these programs — even the most exclusive and well-known ones — by no means guarantees that you’ll raise additional money or have a successful exit. These programs provide startups with office space, free cloud services, and access to mentors, investors, recruiters and media … Those outstanding services provide participating startups with a distinct competitive advantage, but they don’t serve up success on a silver platter. If you aren’t ready work tirelessly to leverage the benefits of a startup program, don’t bother.

Lesson 3: Take advice and criticism well; mentors are trying to help.
“Mentorship” is very tough to qualify, and criticism is difficult to take … Especially if you’re 100% committed to your business and you don’t want to be told that you’ve done something wrong. Mentors in these startup programs have “been there and done that,” and they wouldn’t be in a mentorship position if they weren’t looking out for your best interest and the ultimate success of your company.

Look programs that take mentorship seriously and can provide a broad range of expertise from strategy to marketing and business development to software architecture to building and scaling IT infrastructure. Then be intentional about listening to the people around you.

Lesson 4: Do your research and make an informed decision.
With the proliferation of startups globally, we’re also seeing an evolution in the accelerator ecosystem. There are a number accelerators being positioned to help support founders with ideas on a global, regional and local basis, but it’s important to evaluate a program’s vision with its execution of that vision. Not all startup programs are created equal, and some might not offer the right set of resources and opportunities for your team. When you’re giving up equity in your company, you should have complete confidence that the accelerator or incubator you join will deliver on its side of the deal.

Lesson 5: Leverage the network and community you will meet.
When you’ve done your homework, applied and been accepted to the perfect startup program, meet everyone you can and learn from them. One of the most tangible benefits of joining an accelerator is the way you can fast track a business idea while boosting network contacts. Much in the way someone chooses a prestigious college or joins a fraternity, some of the most valuable resources you’ll come across in these programs are the people you meet. In this way, accelerators and incubators are becoming a proxy for undergrad and graduate school … The appeal for promising entrepreneurs is simple: Why wait to make a dent in the universe? Today, more people are going to college and fewer are landing well-paying jobs after graduation, so some of the world’s best and brightest are turning to these communities and foregoing the more structured “higher education” process.

Even if your startup is plugging along smoothly, a startup accelerator or incubator program might be worth a look. Venture capitalists often trust programs like TechStars and 500 Startups to filter or vet early stage companies. If your business has the stamp of approval from one of these organizations, it’s decidedly less risky than a business idea pitched by a random entrepreneur.

If you understand each of these lessons and you take advantage of the resources and opportunities provided by startup accelerators and incubators, the sky is the limit for your business. Now get to work.

Class dismissed.

-@gkdog

Over the years, a number of social media applications have been released specifically for brand managers and social media teams, but most of those applications (especially the free/inexpensive ones) differentiate themselves only by the quality of their analytics and how real-time their data is reported. If that’s what you need, you have plenty of fantastic options. Those differentiators don’t really help you if you want to take a more passive role in monitoring Twitter search … You still have to log into the application to see your fancy dashboards with all of the information. Why can’t the data come to you?

About three weeks ago, Hazzy stopped by my desk and asked if I’d help build a tool that uses the Twitter Search API to collect brand keywords mentions and send an email alert with those mentions in digest form every 30 minutes. The social media team had been using Twilert for these types of alerts since February 2012, but over the last few months, messages have been delayed due to issues connecting to Twitter search … It seems that the service is so popular that it hits Twitter’s limits on API calls. An email digest scheduled to be sent every thirty minutes ends up going out ten hours late, and ten hours is an eternity in social media time. We needed something a little more timely and reliable, so I got to work on a simple “Twitter Monitor” script to find all mentions of our keyword(s) on Twitter, email those results in a simple digest format, and repeat the process every 30 minutes when new mentions are found.

With Bear’s Python-Twitter library on GitHub, connecting to the Twitter API is a breeze. Why did we use Bear’s library in particular? Just look at his profile picture. Yeah … ’nuff said. So with that Python wrapper to the Twitter API in place, I just had to figure out how to use the tools Twitter provided to get the job done. For the most part, the process was very clear, and Twitter actually made querying the search service much easier than we expected. The Search API finds all mentions of whatever string of characters you designate, so instead of creating an elaborate Boolean search for “SoftLayer OR #SoftLayer OR @SoftLayer …” or any number of combinations of arbitrary strings, we could simply search for “SoftLayer” and have all of those results included. If you want to see only @ replies or hashtags, you can limit your search to those alone, but because “SoftLayer” isn’t a word that gets thrown around much without referencing us, we wanted to see every instance. This is the code we ended up working with for the search functionality:

def status_by_search(search):
    statuses = api.GetSearch(term=search)
    results = filter(lambda x: x.id > get_log_value(), statuses)
    returns = []
    if len(results) > 0:
        for result in results:
            returns.append(format_status(result))
 
        new_tweets(results)
        return returns, len(returns)
    else:
        exit()

If you walk through the script, you’ll notice that we want to return only unseen Tweets to our email recipients. Shortly after got the Twitter Monitor up and running, we noticed how easy it would be to get spammed with the same messages every time the script ran, so we had to filter our results accordingly. Twitter’s API allows you to request tweets with a Tweet ID greater than one that you specify, however when I tried designating that “oldest” Tweet ID, we had mixed results … Whether due to my ignorance or a fault in the implementation, we were getting fewer results than we should. Tweet IDs are unique and numerically sequential, so they can be relied upon as much as datetime (and far easier to boot), so I decided to use the highest Tweet ID from each batch of processed messages to filter the next set of results. The script stores that Tweet ID and uses a little bit of logic to determine which Tweets are newer than the last Tweet reported.

def new_tweets(results):
    if get_log_value() < max(result.id for result in results):
        set_log_value(max(result.id for result in results))
        return True
 
 
def get_log_value():
    with open('tweet.id', 'r') as f:
        return int(f.read())
 
 
def set_log_value(messageId):
    with open('tweet.id', 'w+') as f:
        f.write(str(messageId))

Once we culled out our new Tweets, we needed our script to email those results to our social media team. Luckily, we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel here, and we added a few lines that enabled us to send an HTML-formatted email over any SMTP server. One of the downsides of the script is that login credentials for your SMTP server are stored in plaintext, so if you can come up with another alternative that adds a layer of security to those credentials (or lets you send with different kinds of credentials) we’d love for you to share it.

From that point, we could run the script manually from the server (or a laptop for that matter), and an email digest would be sent with new Tweets. Because we wanted to automate that process, I added a cron job that would run the script at the desired interval. As a bonus, if the script doesn’t find any new Tweets since the last time it was run, it doesn’t send an email, so you won’t get spammed by “0 Results” messages overnight.

The script has been in action for a couple of weeks now, and it has gotten our social media team’s seal of approval. We’ve added a few features here and there (like adding the number of Tweets in an email to the email’s subject line), and I’ve enlisted the help of Kevin Landreth to clean up the code a little. Now, we’re ready to share the SoftLayer Twitter Monitor script with the world via GitHub!

The script should work well right out of the box in any Python environment with the required libraries after a few simple configuration changes:

• Get your Twitter Customer Secret, Access Token and Access Secret from https://dev.twitter.com/
• Copy/paste that information where noted in the script.
• Update your search term(s).
• Enter your mailserver address and port.
• Enter your email account credentials if you aren’t working with an open relay.
• Set the self.from_ and self.to values to your preference.
• Ensure all of the Python requirements are met.
• Configure a cron job to run the script your desired interval. For example, if you want to send emails every 10 minutes: */10 * * * * <path to python> <path to script> 2>&1 /dev/null

As soon as you add your information, you should be in business. You’ll have an in-house Twitter Monitor that delivers a simple email digest of your new Twitter mentions at whatever interval you specify!

Like any good open source project, we want the community’s feedback on how it can be improved or other features we could incorporate. This script uses the Search API, but we’re also starting to play around with the Stream API and SoftLayer Message Queue to make some even cooler tools to automate brand monitoring on Twitter.

If you end up using the script and liking it, send SoftLayer a shout-out via Twitter and share it with your friends!

-@SoftLayerDevs