Features

In many ways, MicroPlaza is similar to Techmeme. But while Techmeme is built on top of RSS feeds and blogs, and derives its rankings from the link behavior of the listed blogs, MicroPlaza tracks your Twitter friends and the sites and stories they link to.

You can see the public timeline on MicroPlaza's home page, but the real power of the service is in its individualized pages.

The memetracker/link aggregator will display the most popular items within your network, but it will also display tweets from Twitter users that you don't follow yet, which makes this a great way of discovering new people to follow on Twitter.

Another cool aspect of MicroPlaza is that it allows you to see what MicroPlaza would look like for any other Twitter user. Thanks to this 'being' feature, you can easily see what's hot in somebody else's network.

Tribes

The idea of organizing your Twitter friends into different tribes is great (just think about how useful the 'Group' feature in TweetDeck is), though this is also the only area where MicroPlaza's execution is somewhat less than ideal. If you follow a lot of users, grouping them can become rather tedious, as you can only see a few of your Twitter friends per page (up to 25), and finding them is hard, as they are not organized alphabetically. While this effort is definitely rewarded, we hope that MicroPlaza will find a way to make this feature a bit easier to use in the future.

Retweeting

MicroPlaza, of course, also makes retweeting an even more important aspect of the Twitter ecosystem. This, however, can also bias your stream if you follow users who are being retweeted frequently. To avoid this, it would be nice if MicroPlaza allowed you to block certain users.

Verdict

MicroPlaza is a very interesting and well designed service (except for the problem with the 'tribes' feature we mentioned above). If you follow a lot of users on Twitter, it is almost impossible to keep up with the discussions. Unless you are constantly looking at your Twitter stream, you inevitably miss out on some great links and stories. General Twitter memetrackers like TwitScoop are great if you want to get a feeling for what the hot topics on Twitter in general are, but thanks to MicroPlaza, you can now get a more personalized and relevant view of the stories and links that are being passed around in your own network.

MicroPlaza has promised to send us a number of beta invites in the course of the week. Just send an email to 'microplaza AT frederic.otherinbox.com' and we will send one to you as soon as we get them.

If you would like to follow us on Twitter, here is a list with the accounts of all of our writers.