Using Particls with Twitter:

For Twitter users, just follow @particls on Twitter. To track something, start your request with 'd particls.'

Example:

d particles follow "web 2.0"

will track all references to "web 2.0" on Twitter.

d particles follow "web 2.0", "web 3.0"

will track all references to "web 2.0" and "web 3.0"

Using Particls via IM:

If you would rather use your instant messaging program to be alerted about your tracked keywords, you can do so with any XMPP client, including Google Talk. To get started, just follow particls@particls.com. You can then use the following commands to begin tracking keywords:

follow "web 2.0"

will track all references to "web 2.0" on Twitter.

follow "web 2.0", "web 3.0"

will track all references to "web 2.0" and "web 3.0"

Will a Simplified Service Save Particls?

For whatever reason, the original RSS tracking and alerting service provided by Particls never quite caught on. Perhaps it was just a little ahead of its time. The service aimed to help us address our RSS/information overload issues before some of us even had any to address. But the concept behind the service was solid: a desktop ticker, instant prioritized alerts, easy sharing of RSS items, simple feed subscriptions, and so on. In fact, that version of Particls sounds a lot like one of our favorite desktop apps today, Snackr, which does many of the same things but launched nearly a year later.

We thought Particls 1.0 was a good first attempt at managing those sorts of issues, but it was not without its problems. The program was a Windows-only client, had some UI challenges, and, from personal experience, hit an older laptop's CPU just a bit too much.

Later, the company split the Particls solution into half, with one half becoming Engagd, an attention management engine, and the other half becoming Particls 2.0, the visualization and alerting engine. From the sound of it, those two projects have now been abandoned - the company notes that all resources have been diverted to the new project, Fountain.

Oops, a DM Limit

Unfortunately, there is one major concern regarding the new service, and it's not really Particls' fault. Currently, Twitter API limits direct messages to 5000 per day for whitelisted accounts. That will severely impact what the service can do using DMs.

Here's a video of Chris pondering this issue:

This API limit is a clear example of the sort of thing a company would gladly pay Twitter for access to, if only there was the option. It's unfortunate that Twitter's hard-set limits are actually affecting the abilities of other companies to innovate around the core product.

Yet that won't stop them from trying. For the record, Particls is not the first service to attempt to implement the missing Twitter Track feature. For example, the Twitter toolkit from TweetLater also provides this functionality. However, the difference between the two services is that TweetLater provides tracking via an emailed digest - not real-time alerts as Particls does.

Will Fountain be a Success?

Whether Particls Fountain will succeed where previous incarnations did not is something that's yet to be seen. However, the company is now actively working with the community and letting them drive the development. This critical step is vital to making a successful product, so it's encouraging to see the interaction.

Through the UserVoice site, 100 or so testers have already begun providing feedback about Fountain. They - and you - will be the people voting on the next step for the service, whether that's tracking your alerts history on the web, receiving an email digest, adjusting alerts through a web-based dashboard, or something else entirely.

If you want to give the service a try, you can do so today; just follow the instructions above. Besides UserVoice, you can also give feedback directly to the creators of Particls on Twitter: just follow @ashleyangell, @stephenkelly, and @chrissaad.

Information Overload

But while FriendFeed and similar services bring activity streams into a single place, making it easier to keep track of your friend's activity, there's still an overwhelming amount of activity for most of us to track. I follow just a handful of people on Twitter, and already the stream of activity is fast and furious. The same applies to the activity of my hundreds of friends on Facebook. Add into that activity from tens of other accounts and you can imagine how quickly an aggregated feed of your friends' activity can become overwhelming.

FriendFeed definitely does some things to alleviate the flow of information. For example, it groups similar items together -- i.e., rather than sending the 50 Flickr images that you just uploaded or the 50 tweets you just made at Twitter to your stream individually, it sends one or two with a link to the rest. FriendFeed also added search yesterday, which is a very useful feature allowing people to see what their friends are doing around specific topics across multiple networks.

FriendFeed tracks 28 services. Profilactic, another lifestreaming application, supports 155. Robert Scoble asked yesterday, how many services do we need? Good question. While FriendFeed certainly makes it easier to track your friends activity at all those services, it also exposes you to all of them. Before if you wanted to follow Joe on Twitter and Facebook, you followed him on Twitter and Facebook. If you follow him on FriendFeed, you also follow Joe on Flickr, and Netflix, and Amazon, and MySpace, and Pownce, and Digg, and YouTube, and every other service he might use. Yikes! (Note: there are some third party hacks to get around this.)

Adding To The Problem

Generally, FriendFeed highlights the problem of information overload, but it also has a hand in contributing to it. We all thought we were signing up for a social activity aggregator, but BAM!, turns out FriendFeed is a social network in its own right. FriendFeed encourages people to comment on items sent through its feeds on FriendFeed rather than on the source site. Some people think this is a killer feature that focuses conversations around all of our activity, while others think that it fragments conversations and could lead to redundancy as a result of "Social Network Switching Decay."

What it really might do is add to the noise. Lifestreaming services like FriendFeed that aggregate our social activity are supposed to be about making things simpler and lessening information overload -- not about adding to the flow of information.

What We Need

In an attention economy information overload is a serious concern. Services that can aggregate activity streams -- things that command a lot of our attention -- and make sorting through all that information easier are welcome. FriendFeed has the potential to be a very useful service in this area, but it needs a few tweaks, in my opinion.

First, it needs filters. As Fred Oliveira wrote, "If I already have Twitteriffic on, It makes sense to be able to filter out all Twitter bits from my friendfeed. If I’m in the mood for checking out photos from friends, I may want to see only photos on my friendfeed. If I’m looking for what my friends have been listening to on Last.fm, I might want to see only that."

Search was a good first step, but service and keyword based filters that give users more granular control over what sort of information is shown on their friends feed are a necessary next step. Filters could perhaps even be implemented on a friend-by-friend basis, and maybe automatic and weighted based on reading habits -- similar to Facebook's News Feed.

Filters would help us to actually reduce the amount of information we're tracking and remove noise from our feeds.

Second, FriendFeed needs to be a read/write service. Not in the way it is now, but by letting users write to the services they're pulling from. If I want to reply to a tweet, I don't want to do it on FriendFeed, I want to do it at the source: Twitter. Allowing me to do so from within FriendFeed would be awesome.

Third, FriendFeed needs an API (supposedly this is coming). While you shouldn't let your customers run your app, you should let your users define your application. Allowing developers to build on top of and extend the functionality of your application via mashups is often how good applications become killer applications. Without the ecosystem of awesome Twitter applications, for example, the service might not be nearly as fun to use and useful.

Conclusion

It is no wonder that FriendFeed has become the early breakout app of 2008. It has the potential to be truly useful, but right now it is doing more to highlight the problem of information overload -- and even add to it -- than it is to solve the problem. However, the promise of an application that can help us crawl out from under the constant stream of information that has inundated our lives is what makes FriendFeed, and similar services, so intriguing.

What do you think? Is FriendFeed a killer app as-is? Has it already helped your to cope with info overload? Let us know in the comments below, and be sure to vote in our poll.

I think a lot of users are going to appreciate this. I'm not so sure about app developers.

Rodney Rumford writes at FB app review blog FaceReviews that this will make the app developers' world a whole lot more competitive, since many apps spread largely through discovery by one friend on the profile page of another. It was via Rodney that I found this news.

So app developers are unlikely to be happy about this. Perhaps demotion of your app is better than having it be deleted?

Time to Throw a Party?

I don't think Rodney's concern will be at the top of users' minds, though. How will they (we) feel? As we read in our recent interview with an early Facebook user, which we think is pretty typical - there's a real backlash against app-overload, at least among long-time users. For some it's a backlash against Facebook apps at all!

On the other hand, many new users may appreciate the apps on the Facebook platform. Apps being hidden will presumably hinder our ability to stumble onto cool new ones. (Like this new near-Dodgeball integration into Facebook, for example.) If you, dear reader, weren't interested in finding cool new apps on the web - you probably wouldn't be reading this blog.

Maybe that's beside the point when it comes to Facebook apps though. They can be pretty annoying. I wonder how many people will move apps but still keep them and how many people will take this opportunity to delete them. I also wonder if few people will take advantage of the new "profile cleaner" and if in fact all of us just pile up detritus on these sites until we can't stand the load, we freak-out and leave.

Either way, I thought you'd appreciate reading about a way to hide Facebook apps - if only on principle!

The company announced today that it's closed a round of funding from Waterloo, Ontario early stage investors Tech Capital Partners and a collection of Canadian Angel investors.

The basic functionality of AideRSS is remarkably simple but powerfully useful. It's the kind of thing everyone I talk to about it says "wow, that's cool and useful looking." Getting a little money in the bank should help AideRSS make its product more robust as well. To be honest, I have experienced frustrating performance issues since I discovered this service - but its functionality has been so compelling and unique that I find myself coming back to it regularly anyway.

ReadWriteWeb first covered AideRSS prelaunch in July, when Josh Catone gave it an in-depth review.

Information Overload

The company is positioning themselves as a solution to the growing problem of information overload. That's a big statement and implementation of that idea can take many forms.

I used AideRSS, for example, in building the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008. In that post I made available a collection of the top RSS feeds in each of five fields I believe are going to be hot in 2008 (Data Portability, Semantic Web, Mobile, etc). Each of those topics ended up having quite a lot of feeds in them and for the sake of efficiency there was no better way to offer our readers a feed of just the most popular items in these top feeds than to use AideRSS. I spliced each topic's feeds into one feed, ran than feed through AideRSS and then ran the AideRSS feed through FeedBurner - but you don't have to do anything nearly so complicated to use this very useful service. You can do a lot of very cool things with AideRSS, though. Try putting in del.icio.us feeds and search feeds, for example.

A simpler example is this. You might feel overwhelmed with the number of posts that ReadWriteWeb makes each day and want a feed of just the most popular items. You can visit or subscribe to this URL to do that: http://www.aiderss.com/best/readwriteweb.com

Limitations of AideRSS

There's lots of different ways to try and determine what the best items in feed are. AideRSS uses explicit Attention Gestures on 3rd party networks to track global popularity. Just because things are popular doesn't mean they are good, though, nor does it guarantee that they are the right items for you to read.

AideRSS is clearly taking a different approach than other systems based on your personal Attention Data, like FeedHub (our coverage) and some of the Newsgator products that rank news according to your reading habits. Other apps can filter news according to what's hot among a particular group of users you belong to (Attensa in the enterprise and to some degree Google Reader).

Everyone wants to tackle these issues and AideRSS has a particular approach to doing so.

Reaching Out

AideRSS has a freely available, public API that other apps can leverage internally as well. The showcase example so far is the super-search tool Lijit, which uses the AideRSS API in addition to various other cool tricks it can do.

This little Canadian company could have a bright future ahead of it. It does a great job of serving both a core need for all users and satisfying the need for magic that RSS power users have. Check it out, it's worth at the very least a few minutes of your time. You might find yourself coming back to it regularly like I have.