Everyone knows you can't see every update on every social network all of the time. Many services have emerged to help find you the most interesting shared content from products like Twitter, based on your own interests, those of the community or the world at large. An interesting one is called Strawberry Jam, a project backed by Hettema & Bergsten, which scans links from those you follow on Twitter and finds the content most frequently shared from your own social circle. Going further, Strawberry Jam also compiles saved searches for your explicit interests, hashtags, and even lists. If done well, you can essentially slice and dice the Twitter stream to make sure your friends are providing you the best from the real time Web.
Strawberry Jam, At Work On Finding the Best from My Twitter Stream
Strawberry Jam, found at the quirky URL of http://strawberryj.am/, makes it easier to step out of the Twitter timeline for a few hours, and still not miss anything. Your friends, assuming they do a good job of curating links, will share stuff and bump it to the top. This is the default view of Strawberry Jam, which shows top content from your stream over the last 8, 16 or 24 hours.
If your friends don't care about the same things you do, Strawberry Jam has figured that might be the case. You can search on specific keywords, like Apple, Android, Twitter or whatever you like and similarly find the most shared items on those topics. This even extends to hashtags and interestingly for the few who leverage them, Twitter lists. Just plug in the name of the list and its owner, and that too can be mined for popular links.
Searching for Solid Android Links on Strawberry Jam
Meanwhile, Strawberry Jam doesn't think you should be constantly spending a bunch of time on their site just to get good content. If you like, you can configure the site to send you email summaries each day, at a time you choose, with up to 5 links per category. So if you want to run Strawberry Jam overnight and get the top stories from your friends on just about any subject, it will be in your in box when you wake up.
Like my6sense, Strawberry Jam believes in showing you top links without the noise on Twitter. Obviously their approach puts more emphasis on collaborative filtering from your social graph to infer interest, but the value is similar.
Strawberry Jam is available by invite. You can get in by checking with Holden Page, the service's community manager, and all around good guy. Besides… today's his birthday.
Disclosures: I am VP of Marketing at my6sense, an assumed alternative to Strawberry Jam. Additionally, Holden Page once was an intern at Paladin Advisors Group, and worked for me in 2009.