Warning: don't try Social Mention unless you have 20 minutes - it's addicting.

Social Mention is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. 

It analyzes content on terms like apigee (score to the left) or Sam Ramji (screenshot below) and gives you alerts, feeds data and a sentiment scorecard. 

Think Google Alerts but for social media.

J

Jon, who built Social Mention, uses Apigee to monitor their social media API. We asked him for his insights and experience using Apigee (see below).

What insights into your app or other benefits have you gotten from working with Apigee?

Jon: I would say the best insight is general API usage and error rates.It's great to be able to track usage on an hourly basis and throttle accordingly.

What new Apigee feature would you most like to see from Apigee?

Jon:The ability to track individual users/developers of the api via query string key would be fantastic. Currently, there is no method to tell how many calls each api developer is making.

What mashup, app, or API do you admire?

Jon: I would have to say Twitter's API - it's simple, to the point and it works great. They also don't have restrictive usage policies or rate limit.

We're working hard to get per developer quota enforcement in soon for Jon and the rest of Apigee users that have been asking for this feature on our feedback forum.

Check it out!

We spotted a great Facebook app in the wild.

Bird.im's Facebook app - apps.facebook.com/birdwatching - brings birdwatchers together to share and discuss their latest finds. 

This is a very well designed and full featured app - enabling sharing of bird photos, locations, discussions and connecting passionate enthusiasts with similar interests.   The Facebook platform at it's best.

The Birdwatching Facebook app provides an API for Facebook to consume when the user performs 'one-click' AJAX actions such as adding a bird, a country, or a photo for a spotting.  This streamlines entry creation by offering an alternative over a simple form and directly improves user engagement as users create and share more entries.   In the future, an iPhone app that enables entries from the field will also consume this API.

Hugo and the bird.im team (@birdim) use Apigee to measure API response rates and errors.  (see how Apigee calculates API response rates and API error rates in previous entries).

Thanks to Hugo for all the great feedback on our Apigee Feedback forum!