Here comes SocialMod

We’ve pushed the first ‘live’ release of Socialmod today. We think it has the potential to become the ‘Basecamp of moderation’.

SocialMod is a hosted moderation service that uses an API to receive items to be moderated (text, images, videos, tweets), processes them and then sends the verdict back to the client’s site.

It’s our first product and the brainchild of our young Rails rock-meister Alex Maccaw. Alex turned up one day at work with a fully functioning prototype and said he’d like our help in designing and selling it, as well as letting him spend some work time on it. Its his company (LeadThinking is the parent company he’s set up) and we’ve taken a small stake. He’s already signed up paying customers, and the service has been enriched through the feedback of several of the world’s leading moderation companies – thank you to Tempero, eModeration and Escalate and everyone who participated in the beta.

Socialmod’s solves a number of problems faced by site owners implementing social software and publishing user generated content.

Firstly, the service brings moderation within reach of ‘the little guy’: the local football club, local community sites, the lower end of market and small businesses. The overhead of creating your own moderation software, or of using a moderation service is often too high for people like this.

But Socialmod also offers moderation companies a number of benefits. Moderation software is – on the whole – pretty rubbish. There are lots of products, each with a different user interface to learn. With notable exceptions, they’re typically quite clunky and often buggy. Moderation companies have to learn how to use each and every system (there could be dozens in use by a single moderation team) and they waste time working round the clunks. Additionally, many moderation tools are bespoke applications that get the job done at launch but are difficult or expensive to upgrade as things change – and things change very rapidly these days as site-owners adopt more and more social functionality. And then there’s the need to integrate with an increasing number of external services – Twitter is the best example. Obviously, there is the scope for moderation companies to re-sell the application.

There are a number of neat features we think will be really useful:

• Twitter moderation (filter on replies/links/re-tweets)
• New profanity settings – option to star profanity rather than block it
• The option to embed moderation into your website using an iframe, so that trusted users can, for example, moderate in situ when signed in
• We’re using an Amazon load-balancer with auto scaling dependent on demand
• There are different plans for manual and automated moderation
• A full audit trail
• A referral and escalation system
• Language filters
• Spam filter
• A profanity filter
• Auto take down (if an item hasn’t been moderated within a specific timeframe – we’ve called this a ‘dead man’s handle’)
• Flag take down (support for reactive moderation)
• An analytics dashboard – a feature we’re planning to expand
• A usage CSV download

Fascinatingly, Alex has also set it up to work with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Service, allowing site-owners to crowd-source moderation.

Lots of releases in the pipeline and we’ll keep you updated with news. Another great design from Julia.

Related posts:

• TweetMod – Moderated Twitter Stream
• SocialMod – Moderation Service