Today SocialGrapple is announcing a special SXSW promotion to help you track your Twitter social graph during SXSW:

Sign up for the $5/mo SXSW Plan and get a free 30 day trial. If you join now and cancel after SXSW if you don't need it afterwards, and it's completely free. This is a limited time offer, the SXSW plan will not be available to new customers after the event.

Here's how it works:

SXSW is coming up soon and there's one thing that happens every year: Everyone follows a whole bunch of people on Twitter, and gets followed by a whole bunch more. A week later, you come into work with twice the number of tweets to read, many people who you don't even remember. How do you track who you followed and who followed you during SXSW, who is important and who is a spammer? SocialGrapple can help.

1. Sign up for the SocialGrapple limited-time SXSW plan before going to SXSW.

2. Add your Twitter account, upgrade it to Detailed Analytics. SocialGrapple doesn't start gathering data until you've upgraded the account you're monitoring, so do it early.

   

3. Head off to SXSW while SocialGrapple monitors changes in your social graph.

   

4. Come back and query your social graph by date range to see what happened during SXSW.

   
   

   (Curious what some of the annotations mean? Have a look at the Frequently Asked Questions)

5. If you don't need SocialGrapple after SXSW, you can cancel your account within your 30 day free trial and you will not be charged.

SocialGrapple has many other use cases like gathering competitive intelligence, monitoring growth to measure your community manager's effectiveness, or plain ol' spying on your friends and confronting them when they unfollow each other.

Get started now.

Tracy's post about WeddingInviteLove scored more than 430 points and 100 comments on HackerNews. I looked over her shoulder as Twitter follower notifications flooded her inbox. A joyous occasion! Here's the final tally of the damage on SocialGrapple, a social graph analytics product I'm building:

Today's report for @limedaring

You can see that Tracy scored an impressive 85 followers from one post. Wow.

Growth overview for @limedaring

Still need to fill in the stalkers/stalking/mutual boxen, but you get the idea. Huuuge jump.

Compare with @shazow

Here's a modest intersection of our two Twitter accounts. We have a lot of friends in common, as you'd assume. You can see my latest Twitter followers from riding @limedaring's coat tails. This is one of my favourite features, being able to confirm where your followers are coming from. I wish Twitter gave access to more analytics data about where followers come from via the API, but alas.

Today's report for @shazow

Finally here's my complete report for the day. Just finished this view today based heavily on Tracy's design work on it earlier. Needs more work, but I'm pleased with it. :)

Want reports like these for your accounts? Sign up at socialgrapple.com, there's a free overview plan but for detailed feeds like this the base plan starts at $10 per month. The best part is you can track anyone's account, even if you don't own it.

You should follow us on Twitter: @shazow and @limedaring.

Due cappuccino e uno cornetto, every morning at our trusty Caffe
Royal. (This time Tracy opted for a caffe macchiato while I had a steamed latte milk.)

(download)

Click here to download:

Morning_routine.zip (364 KB)

(Photo by CHEEZMAN)

Tracy and I arrived at Rome, Italy via the Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport. We hopped on a train heading to the Trastevere train station with plans to switch to another train heading north towards our Airbnb reservation. Then we got mugged.

It's off season so the train is loosely filled with a mix of tourists and locals: a mother with her baby, a couple of French-speaking men as lost as we are, and some nondescript people walking between carts--one man even had a Canadian flag patch on his jacket shoulder. Finally the train arrives at our stop. We walk out with two rolling carry-on bags, one backpack on Tracy and my Crumpler messenger bag over my chest. Not knowing where the next train leaves from, we walk with the flow of the crowd down the stairs to the underground tunnel connecting the various platforms. At the bottom of the stairs, a man intercepts us speaking in Italian and concernedly pointing at Tracy's side. Vomit! Her whole side and back is covered in vomit. Did the baby on the train somehow projectile-vomitted on Tracy? Did she lean on a dirty wall? The man is offering tissues for cleaning, but we panic "no, no!" and run off. We didn't know at the time, but this was the right thing to do.

"Let's find a bathroom," I say not remembering that free bathrooms are non-existent in Rome. We walk upstairs to the station lobby while trying to figure out how this happened and assessing the damage, mumbling things about the mother of the baby. Unable to find a bathroom, we settle down near a wall to clean off the bulk of the vomit-like substance. Tracy took off her backpack and put it near our luggage while she wiped the slime on her jacket using a sock from our dirty laundry bag. This was a huge mistake.

The same man from before comes up to us again, this time forcing tissues on us, insisting on helping us clean. "No, we're fine!" We tried to get him to leave us alone and finally, as he's losing interest, I turn around to have their entire ploy dawn on me: It was all an elaborate misdirection. Something is missing. I wasn't even sure what was missing, but I could see something was off. Another moment passes, Tracy noticed the panic on my face as I say "where's your backpack?" It's gone. The man is gone, too.

Tracy burst into tears realizing that everything was in the backpack. Everything. We knew perfectly well that you're supposed to separate your valuables for this specific reason, but we were exhausted from the red eye flight and were going to execute the precautions when we got to our temporary home. We had a plan, we just didn't execute it soon enough. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I ran to the nearest exit, and kept running the perimeter hoping to find somebody slouched in the corner over Tracy's backpack, rifting through it. A futile fantasy as the score by now has changed half a dozen hands and is carried blocks away by the sprinter. Even if I did find the responsible thieves, what would I have done? What if they had a weapon? Macbook Pro, iPad, iPhone, wallet, passport, sketchbook, neck pillows, everything is stolen. All these things fly through my mind as I run back to comfort Tracy.

By now, a small crowd of English-speaking people assembled around the scene of the crime. An experienced American traveller consoled us with his reason "it's gone, you have to accept it, the most imporant thing you can do now is let go." He's right. An older English-speaking Italian woman offers her assistance, takes us to the police station less than a block away. These muggings happen multiple times each day at this train station, and the police right around the corner does nothing. They wanted nothing to do with us and acted like they were performing a favour by allowing us to fill out a police report necessary for reclaiming Tracy's identity at the embassy. As soon as it was stamped, they quickly dismissed us.

We weren't going to take any more chances with the train stations, so we asked the nice lady to help us get a cab. The rest was uneventful. We made it to our room, went to the US Embassy and submitted papers for a new passport. I'm touch-typing this on an Italian keyboard of our host's old Mac Mini while Tracy continues working on WeddingInviteLove using my thankfully-unstolen laptop. 

What should you do if you find yourself covered in slime?

Do not stop. Do not put your belongings down. Walk briskly and confidently to your ultimate destination, scream for help if anyone approaches you. Get on a train, find a cab, anything. If you're lucky, these swift professionals will notice a more vulnerable target by the time they can execute the rest of their maneuver on you.

Finally, be smarter than we were and buy travel insurance. In North America, we live in a society where companies like Best Buy are trying to con its customers with insurance worth more than the product itself, so we develop an instinctive "Insurance? No." reaction. This is not the same thing. If you're travelling abroad, just throw away the 5% of your trip's expense on travel insurance for the sake of your health, valuables, and sanity.

There's tales of people getting stabbed with a small knife and their bags taken as they collapse on the floor. Locals tell us that they work in groups: A scout on the train might call ahead to point out particularly vulnerable targets, another will wait above the stairs to mark the selected target with a flour-based goo or ketchup, another will distract the target by offering to help, another will grab the score during the diversion, another will receive it via relay and sprint to the secure meeting location several blocks away.

I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky, but we still can't shake the feeling of being violated. What a horrible feeling. All we can do is remind ourselves "it's just money, it's just money, it's just money" again and again.

You should follow us on Twitter: @limedaring and @shazow.

Google, for a free Google TV! I tried signing up for the developer program a while ago but it said it was full, but looks like I got in after all.

Honorable mentions go to Tracy, Chia, David, Maria, Daly, Zoe, John, Amanda, and definitely not least of all our cat Westley for being so warm and good-smelling.