eDiscovery Daily Blog
eDiscovery Trends: X1 Social Discovery – Social Media Discovery for Professionals
According to EDDUpdate.com, social media will be eclipsing email as the primary discovery resource within three years. Social media has become a normal part of our everyday life as we share our photos on Facebook, tweet news on Twitter, and make professional connections on LinkedIn. We’ve previously covered social media archiving tools here, highlighting a firm named Smarsh, and the need for effective electronic discovery methods is only growing by the day. As you can imagine, the sheer amount of content being generated is astounding. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced on June 6th that Twitter had broken the 400 million tweet-per-day barrier, up 18% from 340 million back in March. These aren’t simply meaningless ones and zeroes, either. X1 Discovery has information for 689 cases related to social media discovery from 2010 and 2011 linked on their website, making it clear just how many cases are being affected by social media these days.
With regard to ESI on social media networks, X1 Discovery features a solution called X1 Social Discovery, which is described as “the industry's first investigative solution specifically designed to enable eDiscovery and computer forensics professionals to effectively address social media content. X1 Social Discovery provides for a powerful platform to collect, authenticate, search, review and produce electronically stored information (ESI) from popular social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.”
We reached out to X1 Discovery for more information about X1 Social Discovery, especially with regard as to what sort of challenges faces a new tool developed for a new type of information. For example, why isn’t support for Google+, Google’s fledgling social network, offered? X1 Discovery Executive Vice President for Sales and Business Development, Skip Lindsey, addressed that question accordingly:
“Our system can be purposed to accommodate a wide variety of use cases and we are constantly working with clients to understand their requirements to further enhance the product. As you are aware there are a staggering number of potential social media systems to be collected from, but in terms of frequency of use, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are far and away the most prominent and there is a lot of constant time and attention we provide to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the data we obtain from those sites. We use a combination of direct API’s to the most popular systems, and have incorporated comprehensive web crawling and single page web capture into X1 Social Discovery to allow capture of virtually any web source that the operator can access. Google + is on the roadmap and we plan support in the near future.”
So, who is going to benefit most from X1 Social Discovery, and how is it different than an archiving tool like Smarsh? According to Lindsay:
“X1 Social Discovery is installable software, not a service. This means that clients can deploy quickly and do not incur any additional usage charges for case work. Our investigative interface and workflow are unique in our opinion and better suited to professional investigators, law enforcement and eDiscovery professionals that other products that we have seen which work with social media content. Many of these other systems were created for the purpose of compliance archiving of web sites and do not address the investigation and litigation support needs of our client base. We feel that the value proposition of X1 Social Discovery is hard to beat in terms of its functionality, defensibility, and cost of ownership.”
With so many cases requiring collection by experienced professionals these days, it seems appropriate that there’s a tool like X1 Social Discovery designed for them for collecting social media ESI.
So, what do you think? Do you collect your own social media ESI or do you use experienced professionals for this collection? What tools have you used? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.