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.

Below, an item page for a popular link shared about Toyota. Below is what appears to be the company's direct response. Thus the name of the site, Conversations.

Easy to Use Logic Chains

Tweetmeme portal customers set up complex combinations of rules for which tweets to display using what company founder Nick Halstead calls "a mini-programming language - with a drag + drop interface for setting them up. Rules can be based on tweet, text from the story, title, meta data from the story, geo location data, twitter users who are tweeting...almost any data that is associated with twitter and the linked story that we spider as well. Each channel can have a number of chains - each chain can work separately - but be valued differently - i.e. have a confidence factor associated with it."

The Big Dashboard in the Sky

This is what Tweetmeme HQ looks at, standing on top of all the channels. The ten person team calls its big set of rules "the pickle matrix". Every time someone Tweets a tweet with a new link in it, or a Retweet, that data is thrown against the pickle matrix. That's the field "access count." Then an optimized process of rules are matched. "The data isn't the problem," Halstead says, "it's the number of rules we put against it. This is 1,000 times more powerful than Twitter's Track or search because we can apply tens of thousands of rules to every Tweet we see."

Halstead's company got a big boost from this deal, but Tweetmeme has been cash-flow positive for at least the last 3 months. "I think the more interesting fact," he says, "is that I started this company for the sole purpose of doing this and companies are now only just starting to recognize the value in this kind of proposition. I think that shows how far social media has grown up. And that you have to stick at what you know is right - even if people ignore it to start with."

No word yet on when this system will be opened up to the public, but used in conjunction with other media types like Toyota has it sure seems like there's a lot of potential here.

Disclosure: FM Publishing, a partner in the Toyota project, is also RWW's advertising network.

The LinkedIn plug-in works with Outlook 2010, 2007 and 2003. As opposed to Buzz, users have full control over whether or not to use the service. They not only have to opt-in, they need to download and install the beta version of Outlook, the social connector extension and the LinkedIn plug-in. By the time you're finished, we couldn't imagine you could have ended up there by accident.

Even then, the social connector is a read-only service at the moment, meaning you cannot yet update your services from within Outlook. We're sure that the ability to update from within Outlook will come, but as we said, Microsoft seems to be rolling out these features very carefully, so as not to have the same privacy concerns with its primarily enterprise user base.

As for privacy, Microsoft had the following to say:

Finally, its important to mention that with multiple professional and social networks available for the Outlook Social Connector, the design of the OSC is such that your privacy and permissions settings on each of the networks you use are represented and respected within this experience. For example, if your profile photo and job title are publicly listed on a given network, then OSC users will see your photo and job title when receiving an e-mail from you (if they use that same network). Similarly, if you choose to restrict profile access on a given network, the OSC will respect that privacy. The goal of the OSC is not to create another social network or set of privacy settings for you to manage, but rather to bring the networks you already value and use to the Outlook experience.

While this means that users don't have to worry about tweaking yet another layer of privacy settings, they need to be aware of the settings they already have in place, as the OSC will import and use information from the included social networks.

For now, only the LinkedIn plug-in is available, and the only information on when Facebook and Myspace will be available is "later this year". Microsoft did, however, offer a preview of what the new feature would look like.

While privacy concerns are huge for Microsoft's customers, we have to wonder, like many others, about another concern - whether or not businesses really want social networks appearing in the company inbox.

As Will Kennedy, a corporate vice president for the Office group, was quoted as saying in the AP article on today's announcement, "We don't want this to sort of be the next great time waster in the workplace."

Perhaps this roll-out is like slowly heating the water so the frog doesn't jump out - if you get everyone acquainted with LinkedIn first, they won't run away when Facebook and Myspace come around.

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.

The core product is the filter itself. It consists of three types of search criteria (title, author, and article/body) that can be used independently or together to produce a customized feed of just the content you want. The public version has 44 feeds as source material to work from, of which all or just a certain subset can be chosen for the filter. Each criteria can be narrowed down to a dozen or so levels of strictness, from any of the terms to exact phrase match. Once the terms are entered and the source feeds chosen, you can grab the resulting RSS feed. I took a moment to search all the sources for the terms iphone and blackberry, you can see my results here.

You can also exclude terms that perhaps you don't want to see coverage on. Do you just hate seeing any mention of the terms iphone or twitter in a tech story? In this example we chose to exclude those terms from all sources in the technology category. And remember, you can one type of criteria with another, say searching for a particular author but excluding anything article with particular terms in it.

The Shyftr Publisher

This technology has a lot of potential, but right now it is more of a tech demo as long as you can only apply it to the 44 feeds that are listed on the public page. In recognition of that, Shyftr is building a service for muti-author blogs (like ReadWriteWeb) or blogs with a lot of diverse content to be able to build custom-filtered feeds with certain criteria. Once these filtered feeds are created, there's even a widget for the blog to display. Unfortunately, there was some trouble getting output from the Publisher feeds so all I can show you is a screenshot.

Summary

This service brings some powerful tools to the growing field of RSS feed curation, which got its start with do-it-yourself tools like Yahoo! Pipes and Tarpipe, and a more refined application in PostRank (which we cover here and here) and Grazr. How does Shyftr Filter stand up to these other tools? We can definitely say that the approach Shyftr is taking is more like the DIY tools, but makes creating a curated feed easier and with some sacrifice in flexibility. We don't think being less flexible is a problem - the DIY tools can be awful hard to get working correctly, so we are all for an easier-to-use solution.

What PostRank has created with the Discovery Engine, though, is completely fresh. This is a new function that the site brings to those looking to find new, great content online. Simply use the search bar at the top of the main page to look for a topic, user name (mine is eng1ne), or feed address. If you choose a topic, for example Twitter, you will be directed to a list of feeds centered around that topic. You can open each feed and look at some of the most popular posts in the feed, and choose to subscribe to it if you like it (requires free login).

Once you have done this a few times, you will have a list of feeds that you can then look at in your favorite feed reader. Once over in the subscriptions area, you can choose what quality of article you prefer seeing for each feed (from all to best). You can also assign your own topics to your feeds, which automatically organizes the feeds into topic lists, like my topic list of Austin blogs. At this point, you can subscribe to this custom feed by topic. Your resulting feed will be a combined river of all the different sources in that topic list.

Finally, PostRank has added a Toluu-like social component where you can discover other people using the service, and choose to follow them and check out what feeds they are subscribed to. The PostRank discovery engine keeps track of how popular feeds are getting, and will take that in to account for their placement in the topic lists as well.

Overall, PostRank has taken a very effective system for selecting only the best content in the topic areas you are interested in, and added a personal curation aspect in the form of users interacting with the system, causing popularity to affect the rankings of the feeds. The only problem is, you may choose to use PostRank feeds to escape too much noise, and end up drowning in quality content instead!