Today is launch day for ReStream.me Mobile. Now you can access the ReStream.me discovery engine from everywhere. Highlight from the new web application include:
ReStream.me Mobile is free. You just need a Twitter account to get started.
ReStream.me Mobile is now live!
ReStream.me Mobile is almost ready for launch. Soon you will have many of the great filtering and sharing features of ReStream.me every where you go.
The ReStream.me mobile web app has been optimized for the iPhone. If you would like to preview this release, please send me an email and I’ll send you a link. If you run into issues using another mobile platform please let me know. I want to make this accessible to everyone but I don’t have other platforms to test on.
Yesterday, I added a new features to ReStream which allows you to search across multiple tags. Now when you go to a tag page.
Example: http://restream.me/tag/inspiration
You can add several tags in the search box.
Example: inspiration, history
Now your search can focus in on the topics you’re looking for.
Result: http://restream.me/tag/inspiration,%20history?time=8
Try it out and let me know what you think.
Over the past week I’ve made several updates to ReStream.me.
One of these updates caused some tagging issues. You may notice some links have several unrelated tags. Please ignore this for now. It will be flushed from the system over the next 24 hours.
Changes:
A recent study by ReadWriteWeb has shown that only 27% of tweets contain information with some value. Many people will point to this and use it to dismiss Twitter as worthwhile platform. However, this number comes from Twitter’s flexibility. Some people use it to keep in touch with friends, others use it break news. Some use Twitter for advertising and others use it for sharing information they find on blogs.
It’s this last group that’s the most interesting. It’s the human web. It’s people finding information and sharing it that adds value where search engines can not.
The problem is finding the tweets that make up this 27% of the stream that holds information of value. Further, 27% doesn’t sound like much until you realize it’s 70+ million tweets per week. The best information on Twitter amounts to a needle in haystack.
This points to the growing need for filters and recommendation engines for the real-time web. Last week I posted on micro filters and I believe this post by ReadWriteWeb further emphasizes this need.
To leverage the value that Twitter and the whole real-time web hold, we need better tools. We need more filters that go beyond the basics; Twitter lists, follower lists, and individual favorites. For example, value can be attributed to the number of people sharing the same content or the credibility and clout of those sharing it.
If the web is going to evolve beyond search, micro filters will play a huge part in it but filters alone are not the answer.
Recommendation systems are the other piece of the puzzle. They’re needed to understand user behaviors; what people like and don’t like, what they favorite, what they read, and what they share. Recommendation systems leverage this data and combine it with filters to find the best information that people want to read. This helps us to take a full advantage of the real-time web without becoming overwhelmed.
To solve the problem of finding the 27% of Tweets that have some value, filters will be used to narrow the stream of information. Then recommendation systems, which have some insight into our past behavior, will be able to narrow the focus even further by taking the information output by these filters and funnel it to us based on our interests. This means that we’ll all be giving up some privacy on the web but it’s a trade off we’ll need to make to keep up with the barrage of information.
One of the problems I have with Twitter is staying up-to-date on the latest information being shared. You can’t stay connected 24 hours a day but you don’t want to miss anything either. This is what got me started on the ReStream project.
ReStream is all about finding the best information on Twitter without having to constantly stay connected.
But there is one problem.
I want to be notified when exceptionally great content that highly matches my interests is flying around on Twitter. I’m not always connected to ReStream either which is why I’ve added discovery alerts that send tweets to inform you of this great content.
Tweets are sent from @restream once an hour – no more than 2 tweets – to inform you of the great content that you may have missed. If you’ve added tags to your profile, then there is no need to set anything up. These updates will come to you automatically.
If you don’t want to receive these updates, I’ll be adding a opt-out check box to the profile page where you can turn it off.
Please add your comments below. I’m interested to hear about what you think of this new feature.
This quick 4 minute demo will show you how ReStream helps you find the most valuable links being shared across topics, tags, lists, and your personal Twitter stream. It also show you how the ReStream Discovery Engine recommends content to you based on your interests and the people you favorite.
I’ve created two new bookmarklets to help you send and favorite pages to Twitter without ever leaving the page you’re on. I built them because they fit how I like to use Twitter and I’d like to share them with you as you may have similar tastes.
There are two things that have always frustrated me when publishing to Twitter.
To use these two bookmarklets all you have to do is the following:
That’s it. Just click on the favorite or bookmark in your browser to use them.
There are 2 different bookmarklets. One for favoriting a page to Twitter and one for posting a tweet. When you favorite a page using Fav-to-Twitter, a tweet is sent from your account and that tweet is also favorited in Twitter.
Please add your comments below with your feedback. Additional features will be coming soon.
