Slideshow: Finding Signal In the Real-Time Noise

Finding Signal in the Real-Time Noise

View more presentations from Louis Gray.

With more data being created and shared in more places by more people, each of whom is more active in each network, it is no surprise that many people are being overcome by the sheer noise of social media and RSS. On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to stop by the Bay Area Real-Time Web Meetup in Oakland and talk about some strategies and tools to help cut through the noise and find the signal. From my6sense (who I am advising as part of Paladin Advisors Group) to Lazyfeed, Mozzler, Cadmus, Twazzup, and others, each can help find personalized or socially recommended content that is more relevant than the unfiltered flow.

The full deck is embedded above, via Slideshare. If you want me to participate in your event, or talk to your company, let me know.

Mozzler Filters Your Social Stream for Links, Displays Media

For many, Facebook and Twitter have evolved to be much more than just social networks for connecting to people and their status updates. The services have also become top discovery centers for links, including images and videos. But these images, links and videos are floating in the stream alongside status updates, location service check-ins, and replies. If you are looking for links, the other content can be seen as noise, and if you are looking for status updates, it could be a preponderance of links get you annoyed. The advent of Twitter lists, and some early adopters' creation of technology news brands has helped hone in on the "signal" over noise, but a new service from Mozzler, currently in private beta, makes finding links, and displaying rich media, very simple.

Mozzler, like a number of other services, including Brizzly, TweetDeck and Seesmic, lets you combine your Facebook and Twitter streams into a single feed, utilizing Facebook Connect and Twitter OAuth.


Mozzler Filtering My TechBloggers List for Links
(Click for Full Image)
Upon logging in, Mozzler displays the Twitter lists you have created, those you are following, and also suggests popular streams, highlighting a number of Twitter lists that have crested beyond 500 followers.


Twitter Filtered for Updates With Links Only
Click on your Twitter ID, and you can see all friends' updates, as with other Twitter clients, and rich media, including photos and video, is displayed in the stream, as it does in Brizzly. But to me, the most interesting wrinkle with Mozzler is the option to "only show links". This eliminates all status updates without links, and all @replies that don't contain a URL.


Rich Media Flows In With Mozzler
Combine a high quality Twitter list with the option to only show updates that contain links, and you have a highly relevant social stream, sorted by time - much like I've highlighted previously with the mytweetsense product by my6sense.


Top Brands on Twitter With Links
Chris Were, founder of Mozzler, sent me an e-mail, saying the service "aims to aggregate all the news from your social network into one place", while "At the same time, it aims to help find new sources of news (whether they be twitter/facebook users/fan pages/lists)."

Chris also said the product has much more to do to improve prior to being opened to the public, but expectations are that it will open up mid-January 2010.


Matt Cutts, Filtered by Mozzler for High Quality
Without jumping back into the fray (again) around what is more relevant to find the best news, RSS or Twitter, Mozzler's ability to showcase tweets with links, combined with the most popular Twitter lists, many of whom feature top news brands, such as my "Top Tech Bloggers" list, makes it a very interesting service. You can even drill down on individual accounts to show link-based tweets or Facebook updates, without everything else.

You can find Mozzler at http://beta.mozzler.com and on Twitter at @mozzler_news. The service is in private beta, and I've been told you can get in to the service if you retweet this post and use the hashtag of #mozzlerbeta.