Library clips

I just read over on mashable about the various ways to filter tweets; by keywords, by groups, by links, etc…

Under the keyword section they list filttr, but I got to tell you filttr does it all, not as sophisticated as peoplebrowsr, but it has the essential features. It’s oAuth enabled, post select updates to Facebook, Twitpic, file attachments, shortcuts, threaded replies, and has a mobile version. Below I have focused on the filtering features.

Features

• Filters tweets based on your past reading behaviour
• Manually black list and white list keywords
• Slider to curb noisy tweeps

eg. if a tweep is conference tweeting too much you can slide to receive less noise

• Link only tweets from your stream
• Create many keyword streams
• Create many group streams

But can’t share these as Sameer Patel would like, and which some others can do

• Create a combination of a keyword stream within a group, and also, that shows only tweets with links in them

eg. show me tweets with just links in them with the hashtag #e2conf within my group of people I follow called “enterprise”

• Automatically creates a group of tweeps that aren’t in a group

I’ve been using Filttr for most of this year, and I tell ya it helps me deal with my Twitter stream firehose, plus these guys are really responsive with implementing suggested features, either via Twitter, email or Uservoice.

If you have time you can read the regular stream, or perhaps just read link only tweets in the regular stream, but let’s face it I never, ever, ever have time to do this…

I don’t really create keyword search streams unless I’m researching or there is an event, and I haven’t used the sliders or black/white listing features yet.

But what I do use is the grouping feature (alias), and link-only tweets feature.

Just like an RSS Reader I have folder type streams.

These folders are groups that I organise my tweeps in…you can do a keyword search across a group if you like.

eg. I have a group called “enterprise2.0″
- this displays tweets from about 100 people I follow
- if I wanted I could overlay this with a keyword search eg “wiki”
- then later on I can take off the keyword search if I like

For every group, I have a link only group as well.

For example, if I don’t have time to read all tweets in my “enterprise2.0″ group, I’ll read the “enterprise2.0-linkonly” stream instead…this way I can just read tweets that have links in them.

The main groups I have are:

Regular stream-linkonly
Enterprise2.0
Enterprise2.0-linkonly
Enterprise2.0Essentials
Enterprise2.0Essentials-linkonly
Networks
Networks-linkonly
Communities
Communities-linkonly
Learning
Learning-linkonly
KM
KM-linkonly
Local
Local-linkonly
LocalEsssentials
LocalEssentials-linkonly
Vendor
Vendor-linkonly

Today I may only have 20 minutes to catch up on Twitter on my mobile on the train, so I may read:

Communities-linkonly
KM-linkonly
Networks-linkonly
Enterprise2.0Essentials-linkonly

I really like that I’m empowered to be able to do this. With the regular Twitter interface, my 20 minutes would not get me far, or satisfy me…

Trackle - when a visitor clicks the Tracklet button on your blog they can enter keywords and choose to get latest content delivered by email, SMS, or login to their Trackle inbox.
The RSS feed Trackle is only one of many, there’s loads of them, and you can manage all of them in Trackle. See Notify.Me and others to DIY.

Liveflows - offers related posts from your blog, similar to Outbrain and Zementa, only this one is a distributed network, and lives in the footer of your blog (it actually feels like part of the browser). See related posts from your blog, popular posts in my network, blogs I follow, blogs that follow me. I get the feeling that it’s something MyBlogLog could have done, and something Google Friend Connect (GFC) is doing. Only in GFC you only need a profile to follow people, whereas in LiveFlows you need to be a blogger (which is essential so it can show popular posts from your network). GFC can be seen more of a fans type tool …I do like that the social bar gadget has commenting and site activity, and other features like ratings. Most of these relate to the homepage, unless you embed a gadget in a post.
I wrote about the blogosphere as a distributed social network a while back. [via LG]

Google News Timeline - When you visit the site delete the saved queries. Then from the drop down menu choose blogs, and enter the name of your blog. Voila, now you have a visual date based archive of your blog. Sort by day, week, month, year and drag to sift through the archives.
Here’s a link to my blog starting from Jan 2009.
Of course you can add lots of blogs and other news sources, or even keywords…perhaps a liteweight alternative to Google Reader.
It’s all based on Google Reader, so the archives only go back to its inception in 2005. Also see 30boxes blog timeline. [via DI]

Evernote - How did I miss this one. I’ve been using Webnote for so long, but I’m now testing to switch over to Evernote.
Basically via the web, mobile web, email, SMS/MMS, blog post footer button, Twitter, download version (even for mobiles) or bookmarklet I can add a note, clip a webpage, add an attachment (audio/video/etc) into any of my Evernote notebooks. Also tag all my notes, search (even text in images, limit to title field and tag, limited to one or multiple notebooks), synch files, make public notebooks, to-do list boxes, saved searches…and heaps more. Check out their blog, and tips.

Tinychat - create an on-the-fly chat room, even embed it in your blog

It’s sometimes such a drag being an early adopter because you are ready for features years ahead of when regular users will ask for them…you just have to be patient.

But the day has come, Google Reader has turned into a simple newsmastering service.

Over two years ago I was whining (point 5 in this post) that Google Reader lacked an OPML file for each tag/folder, which it still does, but it has gone one better anyway, well kind of…

I was also whining and still will that the OPML of my subscriptions is a file and not a dynamic URL. Use case is if I import my OPML into a Google CSE, and then add/delete a feed from Google Reader, my Google CSE will not know about it, which is a pity because it means I can’t use Google Reader as a master control for people to use a public search engine across my current Google Reader subscriptions.

OK, the new feature…a while back during the American elections you may remember that Google Reader was showcasing shared item lists based on a curated selection of feeds.

Well now we can do the same with the new bundles feature. That is, grab a selection of feeds and stream the latest posts on a page.

It’s just like our Shared Items page, but now we can select the feeds, and you can make as many of these newsmastering pages as you like, basically an auto-blog based on some source feeds.

Yeah! and each has an OPML file.

Here’s my auto-blog page on mobile culture, access the OPML file of the source feeds, or subscribe to the feed.

If you click the “subscribe” button you will batch subscribe to multiple feeds right into Google Reader, and they will be auto filed in the folder/tag with the name of the bundle page.

If you decide you don’t want the bundle anymore, unfortunately Google Reader doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe all feeds in a folder, so you have to manually unsubscribe from each feed…yikes!

What about subscribing to an OPML?

Now what would truly make this awesome and catch up with what Blogbridge did, in my own words is:

“When you import an OPML file into BlogBridge can you choose it to be a static list or a dynamic list…”

“Basically a reading list means you can subscribe to the URL of an OPML file, but instead of importing all the feeds in one batch, they kind of virtually exist in your RSS reader…if a feed is added or deleted to the OPML file, then this will reflect in your RSS reader…dynamic!”

What I’m saying here, is that in addition to batch subscribing to multiple feeds one go, I would also like the option to not subscribe to the feeds at all, but instead subscribe to the OPML URL.

Just say you subscribe to the actual OPML URL of my bundle above (you virtually/remote subscribe), and then I remove a few feeds and add some new ones. Then this will reflect in your remote subscription of my OPML bundle. I hold the master, and whatever I do in it, will reflect in whoever has subscribed to it.

As I said this would be good as an option, to import a static or dynamic OPML…here’s a post I made on this over 3 years ago, Dynamic newsmastering with OPML.

I guess if this was the case, then in your “manage subscriptions” page you could have a section for OPML’s you are remotely subscribed to.

So what’s next?

It needs:

• an OPML exchange - a place to swap bundles
• a newsmaster exchange - same as above, a place to find Shared Item blogs
• a search box
• tag cloud
• curating, like mysyndicaat

This last one is especially interesting, as it’s not only a topic auto-blog, but you could have the option to remove posts before they appear in your bundle (kind of like moderating), and also adding in posts that come from other sources (kind of like what we do with our public tag/folder shared pages).

And even do this by setting up keywords to filter in and out, the latest tool is MoreOver, and the most common is Dapper and Feed Informer…and of course MySyndicaat.

You know what’s coming next, and that’s to add a group feature where members could:

• comment on items
• write their own posts

Is this sounding like a Friendfeed Room!

Related features from Google Reader:

Google Reader is your new watercooler
Meeting friends of friends

[ADDED 24/05/09: Of course now I can put a bundle OPML into Google CSE, and when I update that OPML (add/remove feeds), my Google CSE will magically be updated]

Buzzable - a neat interactive newsmastering tool, perhaps similar to a Friendfeed Room.
Create a topic page and invite people to your group (public or private). These people have 140 characters when posting content. If group members use the “@” symbol they can reference posts to one another (ie. conversational chatting). Again this is what I like about microblogging, in the very same stream I am posting a blog-like post, but then a minute later I’m chatting with someone in the same stream…then a second later I’m reading some links someone has posted (read, chat, post, share links within the same stream and network)

Also posts you make in Buzzable can be auto-tweeted to a communal Twitter account. If you need some help populating your stream, you don’t have to rely on your group, you can import feeds to re-syndicate content, and filter those feeds by keyword.

An idea would be to associate a hashtag with a buzzable group. When I use that hashtag in Twitter, it will re-post it to the buzzable group, and it will only do this if I’m a member of that group. If someone replies to that tweet from Buzzable it currently re-posts to a communal Twitter account, which is OK because I will still see that tweet in my reply stream.
I guess this would be like member-based hashtag pages.

Use Google Reader from within Outlook - replace the Outlook RSS feeds folder with Google Reader. This comment suggests you can do the same thing in Outlook 2003.

Google Reader offline - RSS Bandit and Scoop. If you are after an alternative web version, check out Feedly.

Storytlr - We all know Friendfeed has won the lifestream battle, but I thought I’d mention this one as it’s a your very own lifestream page without having to be part of a network, ala the old skool Suprglu. Storytlr has a bonus feature of grabbing items by date range and creating a story. They offer a widget to integrate into your blog, but if you want to go even further try a service called iBegin which is a plugin to create a lifestream page on your blog, check out Elsua’s. [via lifestream blog]

Tablefy - Lots of people may use Google Docs to display comparsion tables, well now there is a service that is made specifically for this use. Robin Good has an example, you can track this table, or even embed it in your blog post. Now we can make our own comparison sites like wiki-matrix, well not quite, this goes one further by allowing you to choose only the products you want to compare.

TwitteReader looks similar to Google Reader, where you can mark read/unread tweets.

You can already do this in Google Reader by subscribing to “you and your friends” timeline feed. And there is a FireFox greasemonkey feature where you can tweet each item.

Or better still another service is GTweet, which works with Google Reader by taking your “you and your friends” timeline feed and applying some mumbo jumbo to it. Then you grab that feed and subscribe to it in Google Reader. What it does is displays each item as a tweet, which includes an avatar, and a link to favourite and reply.

TwitteReader allows you to action items eg. retweet, reply…favourite, and direct message are missing. At the top of your screen you can send a tweet.

They also offer a desktop version.

TwitteReader has a blog so we hope to see more features announced.

A good place to aim is what Mio News does for Friendfeed, see my post.

If you are after a mini embeddable RSS Reader for Twitter check out Twazr, see my post.

My suggestions

- a subscription pane (a list of people you follow)
- tag these subscriptions (organise them into group streams)
- search in all subscriptions, and search within a tag (and be able to keep this as a saved search stream)
- filter out tweets, to only see tweets that have links

At the moment

I’m mostly using Twitter on my mobile via Dabr.

When I’m on the web, I’m using PeopleBrowsr
- filter your stream by displaying only tweets that have links in them (Microplaza has created a memetracker from this feature along with retweets)
- create a search stream by searching your Twitter friend network
- create Group streams by tagging your friends (also create a search stream from a group stream)

All these have RSS feeds if you prefer to read in Google Reader.

Another tool on the block is Filttr…this too does group and search streams (and offers RSS feeds)…it also does lots of other filtering.