ArchiveSocial is very excited to announce our newest offering — FuturePast predictive archiving.
The idea for it came about during team lunch when Marketing Manager Alix Bowman first noted that Lead Developer Clark Dudek was a futurist.
“I should have seen it coming,” says Clark. “Once Alix connected the dots, I knew what I had to do.”
Noted futurist Clark Dudek at work
It didn’t take long for Clark to create an algorithm that could predict exactly what would be in a given agency’s social media feed up to one month before it actually appears. This exciting add-on allows customers who upgrade to ArchiveSocial FuturePast to capture complete records of their Facebook and Twitter feeds, including comments made by others, before they happen.
June Medgars, PIO of Greenland, NC has been a fan of ArchiveSocial for years and credits it with getting her out of a few sticky situations in which the city had to remove abusive comments from their Facebook page. She was excited to have the chance to pilot FuturePast with her city’s social media.
“It’s a real time saver,” says June “I’m able to anticipate and respond to public records requests before they happen. You should see the look on people’s faces when I hand them the records of Tweets they haven’t even made yet.”
For now, ArchiveSocial FuturePast is only available to customers on Eastern Standard Time, though the dev team hopes to add Central and Mountain time by Q3 and Pacific Standard by early 2016.
“Once you start adding in the complexities of of time zones, everything becomes a little fuzzy,” notes staff futurist Clark, “it’s positively stochastic.” ArchiveSocial is currently recruiting skilled developers who can help expand the offering to meet the needs of customers across the US and the rest of the world.
This is basically how it works
Compared to the standard archiving plans offered by ArchiveSocial, FuturePast won’t be cheap, but many planning departments will find it invaluable.
“When you think of all the time and money we’ll save by not having to wait for public feedback on social media FuturePast seems like a deal,” predicts Greenland’s mayor Frank Short. “We already have a high level of engagement on our Facebook and Twitter feed that we’ve been able to learn from thanks to our historical archive. Now we’ll be able to act even faster because we’ll know what the public thinks even before they do. It’s truly unbelievable what FuturePast can do for our agency.”
ArchiveSocial CEO Anil Chawla is excited to offer FuturePast, but stresses that most agencies should be more concerned with getting a traditional social media archive in place first.
“A predictive archive is nice to have, but a historical archive is a must have. We haven’t seen any public records laws that require governments to document the future but all of them require a record of the past.”
For more information on FuturePast or one of ArchiveSocial’s traditional archiving plans, contact us at sales@archivesocial.com
