Twitter is a great resource for information, useful links, breaking news and status messages from your friends or companies you’re interested in. But if you’re following a lot of streams, it’s not easy to weed out what’s important or relevant to you from the waterfall of short messages that you’re continuously being bombarded with.
Enter just-out-of-closed-beta Filttr, a new project from a department of web hosting company Racked Hosting, that aims to enhance your Twitter experience with a client that automatically filters content from your followers using an algorithm dubbed FLAI (Filttr Artificial Intelligence) and offers a slew of additional features which might also come in handy.
When you sign up for the service (and yes, you need to enter your Twitter credentials so that’s up to you), Filttr will analyze any data it can find based on your account settings and history in order to determine what you’re most interested in. Once the analysis is done, you’ll be presented with a timeline on a web-based or Adobe AIR powered desktop application (there’s even full support for IM and a mobile site) that essentially filters content Filttr assumes you don’t want to read.
Tweets it deems irrelevant are hidden but can still be viewed in a mouse click, and if you feel the FLAI engine doesn’t work as advertised you can still opt to increase a user’s priority on the settings page or by using the arrows when you hover over their icon. My personal experience using the tool comes down to this: although I follow a lot of people, I’ve yet to see a single tweet get “filttr’d” so the logical conclusion is that the algorithm doesn’t work all that well (either that or I’m just interested in everything). The FLAI engine is supposedly self-learning, so the weeding out part should improve the more you use the application. Also, you get to blacklist / whitelist certain keyphrases and other things to enhance the filtering process.
Filttr does much more than filtering, though. It’s also a client that you can use to update your Twitter account, upload and share files (pictures only for now), search your own timeline, create groups, view conversation threads, etc. Filttr also auto-updates, so no need to consistently push the refresh button if you’re using the browser version.
Even if just for the extra features, you should most definitely check out Filttr if you’re a regular Twitter user.
Can Twitter make a filter? Very difficult?
Twitter needs a way to search over one’s following (”friends”) and possibly follower streams, like, yesterday. Just has to be a search operator in search.twitter.com, e.g. “psychology follower:alexschleber”.
It also sucks that one’s “with followees” RSS stream (at the bottom of your twitter.com/home) is still password protected by Twitter, even though everyone could in essence recreate what’s said by clicking on each of your followees (”following” users) and reading what they said recently, so it’s not all that secret.
Either way, filtering (both by inclusive keywords as well as exclusion) is badly needed. Tweetdeck has some rudiments of this, but it doesn’t allow you to place a fairly complex (search.twitter.com like) search filter on your own “All friends” stream, such as “Wordpress AND Twitter AND Google -wordpress.com” (the last thing as an example to filter out people’s blog announcements).
The filtering that can be done now is basic, and is NOT sticky, ie. has to be redone after a restart. The “Search” button in Tweetdeck does have AND and OR, but no exclusion, and it will search over the entire Twitter stream, not just your followees.
Again, Twitter, guys, we really need this stuff YESTERDAY.
Follow me on Twitter, I follow back:
Twitter.com/AlexSchleber
If you’re mostly interested in certain topics, you can also use TweetGrid.com to create a grid of topics. You can even enter multiple words and/or phrases like:
Ubuntu OR Linux OR foss OR OpenOffice
….into a single pane, for example… and save your “grid” for later/repeated use, or sharing it. ….all of which makes for a very powerful tool.
Not sure how well a secret “AI” formula is going to do at knowing what I want & don’t want to see.
Thank for that tip Bruce, I will try it just now.
I was one of the first users to test Filttr and if Aditya [ the founder of Filttr ] remembers i [ @weemundo ] was addicted to it
, the interface is smooth and filtering process is neat. Just love Filttr ;]
Btw Follow Aditya : http://twitter.com/aditya
Thanks Rahul for helping during the private beta. As for others, please do visit the “Settings” page. Lot of goodies there!
Great for Aditya. i got to know him from the Blogger Scene and call it friend. am happy that he is doing great. i truly am.
Is anyone keeping track of all these twitter apps?
You can have a look at twi5.com
We had profiled Filttr a while ago (must say one of our favourite apps!) while it was still in private Beta!
@techcrunch
Twitscoop is also a great source of information, breaking news and a very efficient way to follow hot topics on twitter. You should try it!
And twitscoop cloud is integrated into tweetdeck (air client for twitter).
We would be very happy to give you more details about our product, if you are interested in…
Vincent, co-founder, twitscoop
I’ve been using Filttr quite extensively for the past month or so. It filters out tweets quite often. It’s been good at figuring out what I don’t need to see, enough that I’ve begun to trust it a bit.
However I use its blacklist/whitelist feature a lot to get rid of topics i dont want to follow.
I would think trusting that it’s not blocking anything I’d want to see would be a thing I’d have to get over. But it seems like most if u like it, so I’ll prob give it a go. The black/white list feature sounds cool.
Can anybody please start a start-up that launches a filter that filters out posts about twitter wanna-be parasites?
Thanks.
Filttr is a great app…tried it…and it’s worth it…Thumbs up !
btw,you can follow me here
http://www.twit...prashantkandwal
The login has a bug,try login using wrong info.It actually prints “DB error”.Guys work on the basic bug fixing.pathetic….
We’re still in beta and ironing our bugs each day. Please feel free to leave a message on our uservoice page: feedback.filttr.com
There is a serious Twitter spam problem. Look at my post:
http://www.dari...l-not-only-spam
interesting project, but totally defeats the purpose of Twitter… often you don’t know what’s important until you see it. and what’s important is often completely new and unexpected.
Very nice information I was just aware of Twitter and Filttr. this will really give a very good option to reader
ciao a tutti
…and thanks to this article, filtter made it on twitscoop: http://tinyurl.com/byoywv
Hey, I thought Twitter was supposed to be a no-hassle, SHORT-sized media for those on the run, so if yout twitering habits outgrow your reading capacity or if you simply can´t focus on following what (or who) you really want to follow… why more software, more interfaces, more records of your daily activities in dozens of other “servives” fighting for survival in no-IPO land? Silly…
maybe i should try Filttr.com, i tried twitter. it’s quite ok.
Twitter is best served unfiltered. If too much noise then drop the noisy ones. One of the best things about Twitter is the effort it takes to get followers so no one wants to piss any off.
follow me here http://twitter.com/netlatch
try this new Twitter app http://tweetalk.me
we will undoubtedly see more of this across the board, dynamic social conversations are tough to filter for relevance
Or….hit unfollow? Don’t see why an app is needed for that.
Because ‘un-following’ someone is not the solution. You don’t know when someone might say something that’s important to you.
Plus, Twitter is about increasing your connections, right?
Very good post and just started using it, works pretty well. Nice to have an option to filter, as filter is one of the big keywords for the year 2009!