We’re  having a “snowpacolypse” in New York City and it’s been pretty busy  – there’s so much I want to write about and so little time.  Every day there new stuff happening – take today – Andy Beal announced Trackur  Free Version Of Its formally paid only  Social Media Monitoring Tool you can use it  free, as long as all your doing is a single search – that is one smart offer and he’s going to get a lot of people to sign up – and I just did.

Having said that – Trackur‘s functionality is so basic, just one or two cuts above Google Alerts – I find it hard to imagine  myself using it – but for someone that is not technical and just wants some basic information I think the price is right (free).

Maybe I’m missing something  – I’m not even seeing email alerts (which is what Google Alerts does) so to say Trackur is Google Alerts on steroids seems to be missing the point that doesn’t alert me about anything.

Would I pay for it if it wasn’t free (for one search) – maybe … but then again, with ViralHeat just coming into the the picture – you can get so much more from Viralheat than you can get from Tracker – if I really only had a few dollars to spend a month – I’d rather spend it with Viral Heat than going over to Trackur – but that’s just my opinion.   At least I could do some kind of analysis with Viralheat – not sure if Trackur lends it self to a measurement perspective – at least, not today.

But you can drill down and get more information on each item in your feed that your monitoring – and you can’t do that with Google Alerts – granted.

I like the  “share this article” link on each item – that’s a good idea and Trackur calculates an influence score, again, which Google Alerts does not do.

I have a problem with the way influence is calculated – the TrackurRank seems bogus – built on metrics that don’t really add up to influence, like a bunch of links and blog mentions – at best, both are extremely shaky proxies for influence.

But … but …. Trackur is free – at least, for one search and if your needs are really basic – and I mean, really basic – I think this is a good basic package – a very, very basic package.  I’m almost tempted to say that if you are going to use Trackur you could have easily just used Google Alerts – but that is just me.

Also, I heard about a new tool called SocialWebAnalyzer that just examines your social media presence and I put in my own website – webmetricsguru.com (this blog).   There’s a lot of link statistics and I’m not sure how much I’ll use this tool but thought my readers might want to know about both developments.