Thank you for addressing this Fred. You certainly know how to recognize a need, invite information and SHARE it.
I appreciate that because everyday I see folks being discrete (selfish) in solving needs.
Your thinking is the real 'open web' :)
Good health, @Ed
(Hi Ivan)
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
well i appreciate your comment very much Ed
but i also am fortunate to be in a job that incents me to do stuff like this
kevin
· 7 months ago
you can also just use a filter of "http://" on tweetdeck, thats works for me. i find myself having the same inclination, twitter started as 99% talk, 1% links and that has now flipped. nobody cares what people are saying anymore, they just want the links. it's kind of sad.
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
i don't agree. i find the talk on twitter very entertaining and informative. but sometimes, particularly when i am rushed, i just want the links
kevin
· 7 months ago
i enjoy it too, that's not what i intended to say. i was making an observation that there is a so much demand for and response to link filtering (twiturly, etc.) lately. don't you at least agree that link sharing has surpassed and now dwarfed thought sharing on twitter over the past 12 months?
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
I think only 20-30pcnt of tweets contain links
But you are right that twitter is getting very link driven
i'd be happy to link to twiggler on the front page of this post, but not if its in private alpha. when do you plan to open it up?
David Semeria
· 7 months ago
Thanks Fred.
We don't have any immediate plans to open it up, we created it to show what could achieved just by using the inherent functionality of the browser (no plugins). If you think it's misleading here, then feel free to edit my post.
Our core business is the framework, not the apps it generates.
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
Got it. No need to edit anything. I just wanted you to know why I'm not likely to link out to it right now
David Semeria
· 7 months ago
Totally cool - would not have expected it anyway.
journik
· 7 months ago
What I really want to see is an unfollow filter. And a block filter. Anyone who uses the words "check this out" should go into a column for me to select all and blast! @journik
That might help you with your desire to shut certain ppl up
Frédéric de Villamil
· 7 months ago
Funny that while you wre asking for it, I was working on a similar thing I had in mind for a while now: a twitter link agregator with capabilities to fetch hastags as well, and push everything to your favourite social bookmarking site.
Next is to create personal trends and then mash them all together into twitter dashboard to show links, hashtags and trends.
stevegotz
· 7 months ago
Anyone else using "Favorites" to tag links they want to follow-up on using their desktop system? It is functional but I end up with multiple pages of high-quality links which I am constantly endeavouring to reach the bottom of. So in addition to battling my way to a zero-Inbox policy, I am fighting Twitter-link overload. With that said it would be impossible to personally aggregate all of that information, so in this case quality far outweighs the management cost...however I'm not sure the same logic applies to my Inbox!
~Steve
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
I do that sometimes and based on the way my tweets get favorited I think many ppl do that
csertoglu
· 7 months ago
I still can't get over my belief that such apps should live on a (preferably cloud-fed) browser.
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
I don't use desktop clients but I think the more ways to use twitter the better
kevin
· 7 months ago
totally totally agree. i hate downloading huge adobe air apps. i will always choose 90% functionality of a desktop app if it can be done with ajax. i'll throw flash in there too. more clients is not the answer to anything.
Nigel Walsh
· 7 months ago
My fav app here is microplaza.com - only web based but works briliantly and you can view from other peoples perspectives too.
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
Cool
I'll check it out
Hutch Carpenter
· 7 months ago
I'll second Microplaza. It may be exactly what you're looking for Fred. It only lists links from people you follow, but for those links, you see the total number of times they were tweeted. You can create sub-groups from your Twitter list as well ("tribes"). That way you peruse tweeted links that are likely more targeted around specific subjects.
Xavier_MP
· 7 months ago
Thanks to Nigel and Hutch for mentioning MicroPlaza!
If anyone is interested in receiving an invite code, just follow @Microplaza on Twitter!
jansegers
· 7 months ago
"twitter started as 99% talk, 1% links and that has now flipped. nobody cares what people are saying anymore, they just want the links. it's kind of sad."
I've almost always posted up to 90% of urls ... only recently I also started to RT some tweets, otherwise I could have claimed even some 95%
William Mougayar
· 7 months ago
btw- Tweetlinx has updated their UI and added pagination and RSS. I like it.
The big theme here is that we're increasingly shifting to reading people-centric feeds (which Steve Gilmor alluded to in his heated RIP RSS post a few days ago), and this kind of app makes it easier to consume content that way. The simplicity here is the sticky part.
This has incented me to re-asses the # of accounts I'm following, so that it's reasonably readable and more useful, instead of being a river of news. I might even consider having 2 Twitter accounts: 1 personal, strictly people-centric where I follow and get followed, and another one where I read Rivers of news and I only follow.
In my opinion, getting too sophisticated in applying filters is premature to Twitter streams, as it's very erratic. One day, someone might say "check this out", but the next day they might send a useful gem. The idea is that people-based filtering should do a good job overall, and it will lead you to unexpected knowledge or other people discoveries.
OurielOhayon
· 7 months ago
Fred, i know of a new service coming out of France that will be online soon. I will share the link when i hear. but from what i understand it is a killer experience. way above what i saw in your post.
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
Please send it my way
Scott Yates
· 7 months ago
Twitrollr is great. If it had an RSS feed it would be awesome.
I tried to contact Doug Estadt to tell him that, but the contact, about, faq, feedback and all other buttons were broken.
I know it's new and everything, but if you don't have a "feedback" page, why put up a feedback button?
doug estadt
· 7 months ago
scodtt, so sorry but i didn't know it was going to be announced today (thrilled it and datetwit both were, thank you again fred), and so i was building a fancy interface to add all the text. am handcoding it now. please email me now at recruit x wsw.com the handcoded text will be there in 2 minutes.
Scott Yates
· 7 months ago
This realtime launching of businesses is rough!
Good luck launching it, and building it! I have high hopes!
doug estadt
· 7 months ago
LOL, you said it, but also so much fun. already have someone working on your rss idea. thanks again.
William Mougayar
· 7 months ago
Doug, It might be useful to have opml as well- as it provides flexibility in splicing the feeds. Thanks :) (no fries, pls)
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
Oops. I didn't know those services weren't ready for prime time doug. Sorry about that
doug estadt
· 7 months ago
no sorries ever needed, was fabulous thing of you to do and very much appreciated. both were ready to go, just had to rush in a few contact details on twitrollr.
This one is awesome because it already has the RSS feed.
I couldn't tell from the site, however, what's the difference between "popular" links and "latest" links. They look like the same list in the same order to me.
Sean Creeley
· 7 months ago
Popular deals with links posted by multiple of your friends within the last 24 hours. If there aren't any retweets in your timeline, it will look the same as latest.
Thanks for checking it out. We will be cleaning it up the design and adding more features soon.
Scott Yates
· 7 months ago
Ahhh, makes sense.
Looks cool now, don't worry too much about the design.
Funny to think that I'm "old school" because I like RSS, but I do like it because of NetNewsWire.
Thanks!
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
Thanks
I'll get it added to the post when I get to a computer
Richard Lomas
· 7 months ago
Twitrollr links aren't working.
doug estadt
· 7 months ago
richard, could you please email me and tell me what sort of prob you're having? recruit x wsw.com
thank you.
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
Sorry about that
Dan Entin
· 7 months ago
I have an alternate solution to a link aggregator: How about a lightweight BlackBerry app (I say BlackBerry because you and I are both Curve users) that allows you to configure the BlackBerry browser to open links using Google Wireless Transcoder (or similar service). I've generally found GWT to load most web pages quickly on my Curve and I can almost always get to the content easily, even if the layout is messed up. This would allow you to click out to links when you want to see them rather than building up a queue that become another inbox to manage.
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
I'm not familiar with GWT. I'll have to check it out
Thanks for the tip
Dan Entin
· 7 months ago
I'm not sure how you access Twitter on your Curve (TwitterBerry?) but you can actually see GWT in action with the mobile web client Slandr (http://m.slandr.net). They transcode all links in tweets with GWT. The downside of URL shorteners in this case is that it's one more server request which degrades load time somewhat (more on mobile than on PC probably).
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
I use sms
Soren Macbeth
· 7 months ago
We do this on stocktwits per stock symbol. So if I tag a tweet with $AAPL and share a link related to the story, we un-shorten the url and list it on the ticker page here: http://stocktwits.com/t/aapl (it's in the right hand side bar under the heading "twitter links".
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
You are way ahead everybody with stocktwits soren
daryn
· 7 months ago
I'd like to get my twitter links and trends in a daily email. I'd like to see the original tweets, for twitpics to be previewed, and for links to be shown unshortened along with the page title... And I'd like fries with that.
Real-time / stream-based is great, but I'd prefer a daily summary email I could filter, archive, and search through later. I thought I saw something similar, but can't seem to find it now. Does it exist / would anyone find it useful if I built it?
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
Do you like your fries thin or thick? :)
Kevin Marshall
· 7 months ago
I built a handful of these type of apps as well out at http://www.halfbite.com (all built prior to your tweet actually) -- you can get a list of links from your timeline, you can see what words you (or a group of users) tweet the most, you can see what two people are talking to each other about via twitter, and a bunch of other things like that...
It's all mostly just stuff I hacked together because of requests like yours from other people, so it's not really meant to be commercial or anything (and honestly not sure how well it would scale to gobs-o-users), but it's out there if anyone wants to play around with some additional things...
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
Thanks
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
kevin - i checked out halfbite. it's cool but i am hesitant to recommend it on the main page of this post because its not really the app i was looking for. but there are a lot of interesting features in it.
Kevin Marshall
· 7 months ago
Hey thanks - yeah it's a little different than the specific things you were asking about, I just mentioned it as more of a f.y.i. for you than anything else...honestly I'm not sure it could handle the traffic from a headline post anyway ;-)
Thanks for checking it out though...and let me know if you would like to see any of it's features expanded on or beefed up to a more 'production capable' version...
Prokofy
· 7 months ago
Well, Fred, I have to wonder why you don't do something much simpler, and that's just read Twitter on the web at those times you are sitting at your computer or have your laptop. Because then your whole page is in front of you with the people you are following and the @s, and you can see all the links on one full page, and click at will. Of course anyone who sent you an @ is there to be seen any time, and if you read the page a few times a day, you can generally see a lot of people anyway unless you have zillions of followees.
Because...while it may seem fun at first to press on every link, it will get tiresome. Do you REALLY want to spend you day reading what *other* people are saying and not thinking in solitude yourself, and writing your own ideas? You can spend hours clinking from one link to the other, but ask yourself: did you really get value from the list of things like that you were clicking on?
Well, now that you have this customized toy, I hope it has a "history," so you can go back and look at all those links, and see whether it was all worth it, chasing them. Maybe not!
fredwilson
· 7 months ago
I don't have a lot of free time and anything that can insure I don't miss the most important stuff is valuable
I get the tweets on my phone and enjoy the serrendipity and conversation I get from them
But I do need to see the most important links that are being passed by my friends
Kevin Marshall
· 7 months ago
I agree that an app like this saves time and helps cut down on some of the clutter...
What might be an interesting 'next' step would be to have some intelligent filters applied to this new app...basically have it index the content the links point to and do a bit of sorting and organizing into topics of conversation...so you could get an even quicker view of the 'topics' people in your time line are talking about (and also purge down duplicates and/or tangent bits of information that is more fun than relevant to a hot topic)...
I think I might have to add this to my 'things to work' on list as it already closely relates to another little side project myself and some friends are working on ;-)
tamccann
· 7 months ago
Fred,
We at Gist have done this for links contained in your email inbox. We now have the tweets and plan to group those links into the stream as well. Thanks for the idea.
Benjamin Yoskovitz
· 7 months ago
Cubby Scott looks interesting because of the RSS feed. Baking that back into a platform like TweetDeck would be great.
Also, with the indexation of links that's happening, I'd love to see a system that allows me to track subjects of links - so I could track links about "venture capital" and group them. Both from my followers but also non-followers. This would help even further, because even tracking links alone can be overwhelming with the # of them being tweeted. Search on keywords in tweets isn't enough b/c the tweets might not have the right keywords. And I don't even care about the text of the tweets (or necessarily about popularity) - just the meaning behind the links.
All Comments
recognize a need, invite information and SHARE it.
I appreciate that because everyday I see folks being discrete (selfish)
in solving needs.
Your thinking is the real 'open web' :)
Good health,
@Ed
(Hi Ivan)
but i also am fortunate to be in a job that incents me to do stuff like this
but sometimes, particularly when i am rushed, i just want the links
But you are right that twitter is getting very link driven
i'd be happy to link to twiggler on the front page of this post, but not if
its in private alpha. when do you plan to open it up?
We don't have any immediate plans to open it up, we created it to show what could achieved just by using the inherent functionality of the browser (no plugins). If you think it's misleading here, then feel free to edit my post.
Our core business is the framework, not the apps it generates.
That might help you with your desire to shut certain ppl up
It's the same idea as links, but just hash tags.
Next is to create personal trends and then mash them all together into twitter dashboard to show links, hashtags and trends.
~Steve
I'll check it out
If anyone is interested in receiving an invite code, just follow @Microplaza on Twitter!
I've almost always posted up to 90% of urls ... only recently I also started to RT some tweets, otherwise I could have claimed even some 95%
The big theme here is that we're increasingly shifting to reading people-centric feeds (which Steve Gilmor alluded to in his heated RIP RSS post a few days ago), and this kind of app makes it easier to consume content that way. The simplicity here is the sticky part.
This has incented me to re-asses the # of accounts I'm following, so that it's reasonably readable and more useful, instead of being a river of news. I might even consider having 2 Twitter accounts: 1 personal, strictly people-centric where I follow and get followed, and another one where I read Rivers of news and I only follow.
In my opinion, getting too sophisticated in applying filters is premature to Twitter streams, as it's very erratic. One day, someone might say "check this out", but the next day they might send a useful gem. The idea is that people-based filtering should do a good job overall, and it will lead you to unexpected knowledge or other people discoveries.
I tried to contact Doug Estadt to tell him that, but the contact, about, faq, feedback and all other buttons were broken.
I know it's new and everything, but if you don't have a "feedback" page, why put up a feedback button?
Good luck launching it, and building it! I have high hopes!
You missed one. http://www.cubbyscott.com/
Post about it here: http://bit.ly/fzkPm
Sean
I couldn't tell from the site, however, what's the difference between "popular" links and "latest" links. They look like the same list in the same order to me.
Thanks for checking it out. We will be cleaning it up the design and adding more features soon.
Looks cool now, don't worry too much about the design.
Funny to think that I'm "old school" because I like RSS, but I do like it because of NetNewsWire.
Thanks!
I'll get it added to the post when I get to a computer
thank you.
Thanks for the tip
Real-time / stream-based is great, but I'd prefer a daily summary email I could filter, archive, and search through later. I thought I saw something similar, but can't seem to find it now. Does it exist / would anyone find it useful if I built it?
It's all mostly just stuff I hacked together because of requests like yours from other people, so it's not really meant to be commercial or anything (and honestly not sure how well it would scale to gobs-o-users), but it's out there if anyone wants to play around with some additional things...
asking about, I just mentioned it as more of a f.y.i. for you than anything
else...honestly I'm not sure it could handle the traffic from a headline
post anyway ;-)
Thanks for checking it out though...and let me know if you would like to see
any of it's features expanded on or beefed up to a more 'production capable'
version...
Because...while it may seem fun at first to press on every link, it will get tiresome. Do you REALLY want to spend you day reading what *other* people are saying and not thinking in solitude yourself, and writing your own ideas? You can spend hours clinking from one link to the other, but ask yourself: did you really get value from the list of things like that you were clicking on?
Well, now that you have this customized toy, I hope it has a "history," so you can go back and look at all those links, and see whether it was all worth it, chasing them. Maybe not!
I get the tweets on my phone and enjoy the serrendipity and conversation I get from them
But I do need to see the most important links that are being passed by my friends
What might be an interesting 'next' step would be to have some intelligent filters applied to this new app...basically have it index the content the links point to and do a bit of sorting and organizing into topics of conversation...so you could get an even quicker view of the 'topics' people in your time line are talking about (and also purge down duplicates and/or tangent bits of information that is more fun than relevant to a hot topic)...
I think I might have to add this to my 'things to work' on list as it already closely relates to another little side project myself and some friends are working on ;-)
We at Gist have done this for links contained in your email inbox. We now have the tweets and plan to group those links into the stream as well. Thanks for the idea.
Also, with the indexation of links that's happening, I'd love to see a system that allows me to track subjects of links - so I could track links about "venture capital" and group them. Both from my followers but also non-followers. This would help even further, because even tracking links alone can be overwhelming with the # of them being tweeted. Search on keywords in tweets isn't enough b/c the tweets might not have the right keywords. And I don't even care about the text of the tweets (or necessarily about popularity) - just the meaning behind the links.
i also wanted to share our startup http://www.all140.com with you.
we are trying to build a really efficient real time news mag
I'll check it out