I wrote about twitturly in April. The service scans Twitter, looks for links that people are talking about then organizes them by popularity on the home page, and the stories then degrade over time. Anyone who uses Digg, TechMeme, Reddit or other news aggregators will feel at home there.
Right now, for example, the page is dominated by Firefox and Flickr news, which hit the headlines yesterday. I expect over the course of the day new items will start to take mindshare with Twitter users.
The best comparison for the service is Delicious Popular, which also shows popular links and degrades over time. Twitturly has the added benefit of seeing what users are saying about the links as well.
Based on the quality of the data (I was worried in my original post about spam) and the modest traffic growth at the still-young site, this looks like a winner. By winner I mean a service that I at least will check multiple times per day for possible news, and anything useful tends to have staying power. Twitter is becoming THE place that world news breaks first, and Twitturly is one of the tools that people can use to quickly filter what’s going on. The next time something big happens, I’ll try to remember to check the site and see how long it takes to filter from random Twitter messages to a top spot on Twitturly.
Omgili Buzz goes over discussions from the web and present this data as well among some other interesting videos, movies, topics….
Twitturly looks like it could be a great way to track popular news on Twitter. It also seems ripe for gaming (i think you mentioned in your previous post). If one adds the same url to a series of tweets, it looks like one can fairly easily make the list. Does the site filter for this? Any update on how aggressive they’ll be on this front?
What they need to do is add a little bit of text comparison, and if the title of two links are almost identical (like the dozens of firefox3 links there now) merge those into a single thread.
http://memegator.com has been doing this since last year.
Okay, it doesn’t have “twit” or “tweet” in the domain name, but it *does* also tag all the URLs that are slurped from the twittersphere too, so you can look for all the URLs for a specific subject
– for example http://memegato...ch&tag=true
kthxbai
#3 Christian Anderson
We filter for that. It would only be counted once. We have dozens of algorithms that are in use to see if we should count a tweet as a vote or not.
Twitturly is very aggressive on this front, and will remain so.
@Michael, thanks for the write-up. I am glad that you like the service.
#4 Chris
We are working on that. The problem is that there are so many different titles for essentially the same content, we are looking for something more powerful.
If you know how to make it more powerful and want to help out and make a little cash out of it, see our blog post here: http://twitturl...ving-away-1000/
There’s also quotably.com/popular, which in my biased opinion has more timely results. It takes a somewhat different approach than twitturly, but one I personally find more useful.
the battle of the aggregators of news
Your first link in the article is broken.
Twitturly and/or Joel Strellner don’t even know how to make the website accessible using both Twitturly.com and http://www.twitturly.com
Currently, the website is only accessible under Twitturly.com, but not under http://www.Twitturly.com
I am constantly on Twitter and Digg, but never even considered Twitturly, which I had heard of. I try to streamline my online experience however I can without losing quality, and this site seems really good. Thanks…
#10 Michael,
I am not sure what you mean. http://www.twitturly.com redirects you to http://twitturly.com. It always has. If you are not being redirected, then your computer has something weird going on with it.
This is by design for multiple reasons, first is to prevent canonical domain issues with the search engines. They can hit you with a duplicate content penalty if they think that you have two different pages serving the same content. In fact most search engines recommend that you setup your domain so that it either forces the www version or it forces the non-www version. Twitturly’s content updates so often this is required for us.
Additionally, the www is no longer a required designation and is wasted characters. See http://no-www.org – Twitturly is a “Class B”.
Finally, if twitter does it, why shouldn’t we.