ReadWriteWeb

Auto manufacturer Toyota launched a new Twitter-based portal called Toyota Conversations tonight and the site is getting a whole lot of press. Most people are focused on how the site seems to contain more positive Tweets than the world at large, but there are a lot of negative links on the site as well.

We got a look at the back-end infrastructure of the Tweetmeme portal system and have screenshots displayed below. These aren't for the Toyota project in particular, but they are the same tools being put to use in a different campaign. We know you feed and data geeks fantasize about building the ultimate feed moderation system. Check out the one that Toyota put down no small sum to get to use. It's a nice combination of heavy duty and easy to use, just like you'd expect for a big corporate customer like this. The best news? This system will be opened up to the public soon.

Everybody is getting in the game. Google just announced Buzz, its social feed add-on to Gmail, last week and today Microsoft is bringing the feed to Outlook. Microsoft first announced its social media add-on, the Outlook Social Connector, last November but today begins the public beta period for LinkedIn for Outlook. The company has also announced partnerships with Facebook and Myspace.

Bloggers, muckrakers and news fanatics, lend me your ears. It's entirely possible that we've discovered one of the best approaches to media monitoring since RSS itself. My mother always said, "You'll never get what you want unless you ask." But with adaptive feed application Parse.ly, that simply isn't true. Rather than forcing us to abandon our overflowing feed readers, Parse.ly records our preferences and learns to work with us.

Shyftr made the news last year about their feed reader service which, while similar to Google Reader, triggered alarms about content theft. Since backing off from that idea, it has been working hard on a new product called the Shyftr Filter that also deals with RSS feeds, but in a completely different way. The new service centers around being able to refine just the content you want from RSS feeds by using a flexible set of search tools.

Announced yesterday (with early coverage from Louis Gray), the initial alpha has a public filter that lets anyone test the technology on a group of a few dozen feeds, and a registration-only Publisher area that allows users to add up to 5 of their own feeds to use with Shyfter Filter.

PostRank today announced a new feature to its website called the Discovery Engine. This leverages the power of its existing automatic ranking algorithms to recommend new information sources to visitors. Along with this new tool comes a completely revamped web page layout that focuses more on the user experience on the site.