If everything had a button like that, people would feel comfortable subscribing to more things in the first place. Can you imagine if your cable TV provider said "this package includes 100 channels - but you have to watch every single one of them every day"? You wouldn't buy cable TV if that was the case. Why then does subscription on Facebook, Twitter or RSS have to mean all content all the time?

Twitter client software Tweetdeck enables a user to block messages containing keywords, a crude way to mute out Lost spoilers or Apple announcement overload. That only works so well, though. I can't think of any software that lets you temporarily mute a user posting an unusually high volume of messages on a topic you're not interested in. List management is the closest option, but I think something much more powerful and flexible is possible.

RSS feeds are something that could use a mute button as well. Imagine a prompt that said "you haven't read any items from the following feeds in 3 months - would you like them to be put in a special place outside your river of news?" That would be great, and it's something that consultant Nicole Simon discussed with Mark Fletcher in an interview more than 5 years ago.

For whatever reason, though - people haven't built a feature like this. Mozilla's new email thread mute will be an interesting experiment. Will users make use of it? What more could be done with a smart mute button across the web?

There are conflicting paradigms at issue:

• Curated, refined experiences controlled by systems like the Facebook newsfeed algorithm or Apple's walled garden vs. more control for the user over what they see.


• Concerns about information overload vs. comfort with occasional and serendipitous dips in the river of news.


• Interfaces that strive to deliver a high signal-to-noise ratio (like no irrelevant emails in your inbox) vs. interfaces that facilitate skimming for gems (like RSS).

Which side will win? Probably the stifling, controlled, less-chaotic former of each of those dichotomies vs. the latter that emphasizes freedom but at the cost of efficiency. Hopefully, though, those of us who want to take effective and sophisticated tools out into the wilderness of the uncontrolled, verdant web won't be forgotten. We could really use some handy mute buttons, so that we could subscribe to more content in total without feeling overwhelmed at any one given time.

Until now, most of us just organized our inbox chronologically. By focusing on "importance," Priority Inbox uses a very different paradigm. According to Google's own data based on early tests of the system, "testers spent 6% less time managing email after enabling Priority Inbox." While that does not sound like much, it adds up to a whole week of recovered time each year for the typical information worker.

In addition to the focus on important messages, Priority Inbox also adds a new section for starred emails to your inbox. If you use Gmail stars regularly to mark messages that you need to act upon at a later point, you can now rest assured that these starred messages will remain visible in your inbox and won't get pushed to the next page and out of sight by new mail.

Customize Your Priority Inbox

Google allows users to extensively customize Priority Inbox. You can change how many messages you see per section, for example, and you can also choose which sections you want to see in your inbox (Important, Important and Unread, Unread, Starred, etc.). Of course, you can also choose to turn Priority Inbox off. These customization option are available through the Gmail settings menu and also directly in the Gmail interface.

Getting Things Done with Priority Inbox

Earlier today, we also got a chance to talk to David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, about today's new Gmail features. Allen, who is well known in technology circles for his ideas about productivity and managing email, told us that he was rather skeptical when he first heard about this new tool. After talking to Google about it though, he now thinks that it can help Gmail users make more effective decisions about their email and to avoid constantly looking at their email in what he calls the "emergency scanning mode" because they have no way to prioritize all the messages in their inboxes. Allen also thinks that the combination of Gmail stars in addition to the algorithm will help people to remain in control of their email. The assumption behind this, of course, is that Google's algorithm does indeed work as advertised.

In our own test this afternoon, the algorithm did a good job at highlighting important messages, but we will have to test it over a longer period of time before we can make a definitive statement about its usefulness.

Availability

Google plans to roll out Priority Inbox to all regular Gmail accounts and Google Apps users over the next day. For Google Apps users, the account administrator has to flip "enable pre-release features" switch in the Google Apps settings before users can access this new functionality.

When you view a contact in Silentale for iPhone, you see their contact details as you would within any Address Book type application, but you also see their social profiles and a complete history of your conversations - whether that included emails, Facebook messages or Twitter posts.

You can then email, reply or forward messages to a contact directly from within the app. You can send an SMS text message or call them, too. And you can view, download and forward the attachments in the messages Silentale finds. Essentially, it's a "CRM-lite" type application for the iPhone.

Silentale: Easy, Great...When it Works

In the past, we were surprised that Silentale didn't get more media coverage - the online service it offers is fairly robust... and free, at least to start. The basic version of the online service lets you import up to 3 accounts, is updated every 3 hours and imports 4 weeks of conversation history. For $49/year, you get 6 accounts, 2 years of history and hourly updates. For $99, you get 12 accounts, unlimited import and half-hour updates.

As to why Silentale seems to be somewhat ignored, our first guess was its name - "Silentale" doesn't really roll off the tongue nor does it give you an idea of what this service offers. Its competitor, "Gist," is branded better, in our opinion. Gist does a bit more, too - it provides dashboards for viewing people and companies, for example, and it incorporates RSS feeds, Web mentions, Google image results and more. It's not "CRM-lite," by any means, but its complexity may also be more than what some people have need of. For those that just want a searchable conversation archive, there's Silentale.

However, it's now starting to become clearer as to why Silentale isn't making waves the way Gist is - the service often seems to suffer from stability issues. During testing, we encountered errors and timeouts more than a few times, both with the iPhone app and when previously testing the online service. The iPhone application wouldn't allow us to authenticate upon first launch, for example. Although today's issues and the prior ones could just be chalked up to launch day jitters (and the problems were soon corrected), it's still a concern. We don't know if the company needs to throw more servers at the problem, acquire more bandwidth or just hire better network engineers, but they can't expect busy people to rely on an app that doesn't consistently work.

No matter, we suppose: it works now and works as advertised, albeit after a lengthy "import" process (and one that required closing, then relaunching the app). But given the prior issues and time-consuming set up, we can't 100% recommend this app until the company gets things straightened out. (And we do hope it does - Silentale is incredibly useful when functional!) All that being said, the app is free, so if you want to brave it, you can download a copy for yourself here on iTunes. Just don't say we didn't warn you if you hit bugs.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/view_complete_contact_and_conversation_history_with_silentale_for_iphone.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/view_complete_contact_and_conversation_history_with_silentale_for_iphone.php Apple Wed, 21 Jul 2010 06:58:08 -0800 Sarah Perez Silentale, the new web service that backs up and archives your contacts and messages from all the communication platforms you use, has now launched into public beta as of this morning. The online application is part universal inbox, part social CRM tool and part contact management solution. But unlike some of its competitors, the best part about Silentale is that it archives your messages - all of your messages, including every single email, Twitter reply or direct message, Facebook message and more and then makes those searchable from one location.

If you've ever searched through your inbox for that email you just know you received..sometime...somewhere...and have come up dry only to find it later in your Facebook or Twitter inbox, then Silentale is an ideal solution for you.

The system is designed for those of us who consistently communicate over multiple channels and then can't remember where to find the information we need. This "information overload" problem is something many companies are trying to address whether by offering an email prioritization system, universal inbox, inbox CRM add-on or external contact management type service.

Yet no system is perfect. In fact, earlier today, Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures, declared "email bankruptcy" via a post on his blog, despite his use of external contact management services like Gist and Etacts. He says that he has to perform 30 Gmail searches to find the messages from his top contacts. There are better ways to do this using just Gmail, of course, as the blog commenters pointed out, but Silentale could help him address another issue: what if the message wasn't sent as an email? Silentale can pull all the messages associated with a contact and present them in one view.

In the future, Silentale will continue to grow their search offering to allow for combination searches, the ability to save searches plus access to search history and last contacts viewed.

The Info Overload Problem

The problem with many of today's external email and contact management solutions is that they either expect you to use their inbox over the much more robust webmail or desktop-based email program you already have in place or they aggregate your messages, but don't archive them.

Silentale's closest competitor may be Gist and in many ways, it reminds us of that service. Gist retrieves contacts from your email and social networks and gives you a combined view of their activity, including related news, events, attachments and links. Silentale does much of the same.

But while Gist is more focused on being more of a business-ready social CRM tool, Silentale focuses more on being a searchable communications archive. "No one else provides your complete history of emails combined with tweets, Facebook messages etc., that you can search and access from anywhere," explains Silentale's GM, Shannon Ferguson. "We're a complement to the services you already use to communicate vs. a substitute."

Another difference between some of the competitive solutions out there and Silentale is the application ecosystem. You don't necessarily have to log in to the web service to use this system. It also functions by way of a Firefox add-on and search plugin and will soon arrive as an iPhone app, Android app and Outlook plug-in. An API for developers is also available for the creation of additional third-party applications.

Pricing and Sign Up Information

For those connecting five or fewer accounts, Silentale will remain free, although your message archive will be limited to six months. A "Pro" plan will backup 10 accounts and import 2 years of message history for $49/year and the "Pro Plus" plan supports 20 accounts and unlimited import. Enterprise plans are also available and will receive group discounts, depending on volume.

You can sign up for a free beta account here: http://silentale.com

Ed Chi, area manager and principal scientist for the Augmented Social Cognition Research Group at PARC, told MIT's Technology Review that the way people use Twitter is that they "dip in" to the Twitter stream from time to time, but don't want to consume it all at once. The Eddi Project was created so that those brief dips into Twitter are more valuable to the end users.

The tool, Eddi, a Twitter client application named after the idea of eddies in a stream, has the barebones look of something built by data researchers as opposed to web designers. But its user interface isn't the most important aspect - it's the algorithms behind the facade that are its standout feature.

In order to filter Twitter's content, Eddi provides two tools: a topic browser that shows tweets broken down into categories and a recommendation engine.

Twitter Topics - And Not Just the Popular Ones

The idea of browsing Twitter by topic is not unique - plenty of Twitter apps do the same, as does Twitter's own search interface at search.twitter.com. But the problem with most of these systems is that they rely on keywords or hashtags - the latter being the annotations preceded by the pound sign (#) which users add to their tweets to make them searchable.

When there is a major event, such as the Icelandic volcano eruption, Michael Bernstein, a researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT who is involved with the project, explained, the sheer volume of tweets provides a lot of information for an algorithm to use. What's harder is to figure out are the topics attached to tweets that are more unique.

"The essence of the approach is to coerce a tweet to look more like a search query and then get a search engine to tell us more," says Bernstein. After cleaning up the tweet, the tool feeds them into Yahoo's Build your Own Search Service interface in an effort to surface web pages related to the tweet in question. This helps the system to appropriately categorize the tweets into topics.

Recommendation Engine

The second aspect to the system is a recommendation engine that ranks tweets by how interesting they are to you. To determine this, Eddi's algorithms look at your own tweets and interactions with other Twitter users.

The new system will go live on the web for public testing sometime this summer. In the meantime, you can sign up for another of PARC's experimental Twitter recommendation engines, this one called ZeroZero88. Information on sign up is here.

With the new service and its optional web browser plugin, you're able to configure alerts for critical, "can't miss" email messages and can choose to have those alerts sent to you via instant message, Twitter, SMS text message or even a phone call.

The new service, dubbed AwayFind Orchant, is an expansion of AwayFind's core product, an email alerts service that helps you deal with the very real-world problem of information overload. With the original product, AwayFind 1.0 (previous coverage), people who email you are directed to your AwayFind contact page where they can fill out a brief form describing the nature of their emergency. Those who do so will be rewarded by having their message actually reach you, either via text message or via an email to another inbox, even though you're away from your primary email account at the time.

However, that auto-responder, while nice to have, put the burden on those contacting you to make sure their message was read. It also allows any person to reach you, even if you don't consider the message urgent or important. (Case in point: you would be surprised how many PR professionals decided to use the AwayFind service to pitch me "urgent" news about some startup!)

With the new service, you are back in control. You designate which emails are important. This configuration takes place during the setup process where you specify filters similar to those you already use to sort messages into folders or labels in your inbox. With these filters in place, you're telling AwayFind how to identify which messages are important to you. For example, you could filter for any message from your boss, messages containing the word "urgent" in the subject, messages sent to a specific email address, messages sent to your project team from the team leader, etc.

You can then specify what actions AwayFind should take in order to alert you. You can choose to be contacted via IM (AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk are supported), Twitter, another email address, a SMS text message or a voice phone call. You can also configure other options, like which auto-responder template to send when a message matches a specific filter. You can even specify if there is someone who shouldn't get your auto-response while everyone else does - perfect for playing hooky without the boss catching wind!

Web Browser Plugin Brings Filtering to the Inbox Itself

All of this configuration is done from AwayFind's online service but you can also configure settings from the place where you spend the most time: your inbox. This is where the Firefox plugin comes into play. After installation of the plugin, a small arrow appears next to a contact's name in an email message. When clicked, you're provided with options so that you can set up a filter for that sender instantly, including how you want to be notified (Twitter, IM, phone, etc.).

Requirements and Future Plans

At the moment, the new service supports Gmail and Google Apps accounts, all IMAP accounts (think me.com, mac.com, aim.com, etc.), Hosted Exchange 2003, 2007 and 2010 accounts (assuming Exchange Web Services is supported, which is usually the case), and in the near future, full Yahoo support will arrive. The web browser plugin only works in Firefox right now but a Chrome plugin is just weeks away. Plans for an Outlook plugin are in the works, too.

Also, in the case of Gmail/Google Apps, the plugin uses oAuth which means that it doesn't need to request your password. However, for the other connections you'll need to provide your password plus your account settings where applicable.

This service is currently in private beta, but we have 500 invitations to give away. Just click here to sign up.

That's not to say that merging of social networks with the inbox in and of itself is a bad idea - Google Buzz, Xobni, and Outlook's new social connector all offer innovative ways to augment the inbox experience. But there's a key difference between these apps and those promising a "universal inbox" - they come to you, in the inbox you already know and love.

The idea of a universal inbox is smart. On paper, that is. In our "information overloaded" modern age, messages come at us left and right from multiple email accounts, instant messaging programs, SMS on our mobile phones and from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And yet, none of the "universal inbox" applications have ever really taken off.

We've seen some worthy contenders though. Fuser, NutshellMail and Inbox2, for example, all merge messages from multiple platforms into one unified service. The more clever of these programs provide a way to make Facebook the interface you use to check your mail instead of forcing you into some new web service. However, even that option hasn't attracted a large following.

Inbox2's Facebook app "emailstream" only has 245 active users. NutshellMail's does a little better with just over 5400 users. But when you think of the hundreds of millions of registered users on Facebook (400 million at the last count), these numbers aren't even a drop in a bucket - they're more like a grain of sand on a long stretch of beach.

The sites' web destinations do a little better, but only a service called OtherInbox is doing well, with 67,000+ visitors last month. NutshellMail seems to be hanging in there, too - even growing its traffic a bit lately - and yet it attracted just under 24,000 uniques last month (according to Compete - not always the best source of statistics but good enough for this quick glance). An article on Digg's homepage often get more hits than that! And it's an understatement to say these numbers fall short of the millions who routinely log into online email accounts from Gmail, Hotmail and the like.

So what's wrong? Why aren't these services more popular?

People Want to Use Their Own Inbox, Not Some 3rd-Party Service

The answer to that question has its roots in what people expect from an email application. Email services from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and yes, even AOL, among others are designed from the ground-up to provide that company's vision of the best messaging experience. The applications are feature-rich with advanced options like POP3 and IMAP support, forwarding, filters, labels, auto-replies, vacation responders, spam filters and more.

Third-party aggregation-type applications don't always have the same feature set. Plus, they typically have their own very un-email like interface - the applications tend to treat your email like activity streams on a social network, not critical messages that need to be filed, forwarded, replied to, or turned into tasks and calendar appointments. The exception here seems to be OtherInbox - they offer a real inbox complete with calendar tie-ins, stars for saving messages, spam filters and other typical email features. Not surprisingly, they're the one doing the best out of all the other inbox applications listed here. However, they're not actually a "universal" inbox. They don't claim to merge all your messaging services into one - they simply help you better sort and organize your mail. So, really, they don't count.

Socializing as an Inbox Layer

A better solution to the merging of messaging and social is, interestingly enough, exactly what Google has just launched with Buzz. Sure, that service has gotten off to a rough start with bugs, missing features and of course, the privacy issues, but the concept is solid. In Buzz, social networking becomes an additional layer to your inbox - one click and the display changes to a stream of social activity; click again and you're back to your email. Important "social" messages (those you created, commented on or liked in Buzz) grab your attention by re-appearing in your inbox proper.

Other companies have similar ideas about socializing email. Xobni, for example, offers a plugin for Outlook that extracts social information about your contacts (among many other things). Microsoft, too, is just now launching its social layer for Outlook - the Social Connector which optionally lets you integrate LinkedIn and soon Facebook and MySpace into your inbox.

These programs all have a better shot at unifying the inbox to create a truly universal email application. They provide you with your "real" inbox and all its features while layering it with a social element. You don't have to migrate to a new service entirely. Meanwhile the standalone universal inbox applications available today probably won't last. They would be better off developing their service into a plugin or add-on for the webmail and desktop programs that people use now instead of trying to convince people to start checking their email elsewhere.

This sounds brilliant, doesn't it? The only question now is will it actually work?

And yet again, here comes another program promising a solution to information overload, a nut so tough that no one has truly found the way to crack it yet. Will Gtriage be our savior? Or just another service that doesn't live up to its potential?

Gtriage: Machine-Learning for your Gmail

The answer comes from Gtriage's algorithm for measuring importance. The company calls it "powerful machine-learning technology" - they've even cutely nicknamed it Buckminster and Blockhead, represented by two cartoon characters. Blockhead learns the universal characteristics that make email important and Buckminister learns what you specifically find to be important.

This dual approach to measuring importance addresses some of the issues found with other systems - they often don't understand that frequency of communication isn't the only factor in ranking email. A person you email with regularly may be far less important to you than someone who only emails once in a blue moon. But having a machine figure out which of those "rare" emails should rank highly is tricky. Will Gtriage know?

According to the company's website, their system learns about you and improves the longer you use it. Once set up, you continue to use your Gmail as you would normally while Gtriage watches your actions and customizes itself to your behavior. The end result, in theory, is an email ranking program that works without any extra effort on your part. What's more, Gtriage does all this without requiring any extra plugins or apps. It even works on your mobile.

Will Gtriage Solve Info Overload?

If Gtriage works as promised, it could easily be a lifesaver for Gmail users everywhere. So much so that they'll even pay to use the service - or at least, that's what the company hopes. They've lined up multiple pricing programs to cater to users with more than one Gmail or Google Apps account. However, right now the service is offered free to Gmail users assuming you have an invite code to get in (you can beg for yours on Twitter here).

This system isn't the sort of service we could immediately review. It will take time for it to get to know us and our inboxes before we can dub it a winner, a failure or something in between. But the promise it holds has us hoping for the best.

Gist is not a system for the casual email user whose main communications involve sending email forwards to friends and pictures of the kids to mom and dad. Instead, Gist is designed to help the professional email user who often opens up their inbox only to feel like it's helplessly out of control. How do you know what the most important communications are? How can you stay up on what your email contacts are doing? Gist aims to solve these problems.

Through ongoing analysis of your email, Gist determines what's important based on the frequency and types of communications that occur. It then provides you with the following: profiles, insights, and actions. Profiles include both individual and company profiles, insights are the relevant information about your most important contacts, and actions are the ability to share news and contact details using the online service.

When you're signed into Gist, you're presented with a dashboard where boxes display key information like your top emailed contacts, news about those contacts, upcoming events, email attachments, and links. All this information is automatically retrieved from your inbox with no effort on your part. It's as if your email inbox serves as the backend database for this unique relationship management system.

Tabs at the top of the page let you move from the dashboard to sections where you can focus on People or Companies specifically, organizing them into groups, tagging them (a new feature), removing those you don't need to track, managing their importance levels via sliders, editing them, and much more. You can also click to view individual contacts and companies and edit the data there if need be.

New Features

One of the new features included in this updated public version of Gist is the ability to pull in contacts from Salesforce. This is a helpful addition to the program which also supports Gmail, Outlook, general Email/IMAP accounts, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You can import your own CSV file, too.

With additional software, Gist can be integrated right into Outlook and Salesforce. The Outlook integration is done via a plugin which pops up a separate window where you can access info on people, companies, events, messages, and attachments. The plugin was available previously, but has been updated in the new version. The company decided to go with a pop-up type of plugin for a few reasons. For one, by not implementing it as an email sidebar (like Xobni does, for instance), Gist data can be accessed from any screen in Outlook whether that's your inbox itself, a contact's details page, a meeting request form, etc. They also made the plugin work more like a mini-browser so it could perform its actions quickly while not slowing down Outlook in the process.

Also new today is Gist's integration with Salesforce. Not only can you pull data into Gist via the CRM system, you can now set up a Gist widget of sorts that displays right in Salesforce itself. Here, you can stay current on news, blogs, tweets, and other relevant information from your Salesforce contacts.

Integration with Twitter and the ability to share via Twitter and Facebook round out the new features in this latest beta build. Since many business folks can't be bothered to friend and follow their contacts on Twitter, Gist does it for you. It doesn't actually follow users on your behalf in your own Twitter account, but it pulls in their tweets from their publicly available timelines right into Gist. You can then respond or share information via Twitter or Facebook - an important step in managing and maintaining communications in today's tech savvy business world. You can still share items via email or flag them for later, as you could with previous Gist versions, too.

For now Gist remains a free service, though a more advanced paid version is in the works for the future. Gist is also working on their mobile offerings but have nothing to announce as far as specialized mobile applications just yet. New users can sign up for Gist now here: www.gist.com

Yesterday's study about Facebook's impact on GPA scores was not a conclusive, comprehensive report. Instead, it was simply a set of preliminary discoveries that Ohio State researcher Aryn Karpinski said could be looked into deeper. In fact, she asserts that most media reports overstate her findings - she just found a connection and more should be done to study the matter. "What I found is so exploratory -- people need to chill out," she was quoted as saying.

But right on the heels of that news - exploratory or not - comes another report that may even be more damaging: social media could lead to amorality. At least that appears to be the overall takeaway from this new report.

In this case, a study from a neuroscience group led by Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, suggests that our digital media culture may lend itself better to some mental processes than others. And the ones it doesn't lend itself that well to? You guessed it: moral decision-making.

No Time for Reflection

According to first author Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, "for some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection." Unfortunately, in our "real-time" web of information flow, some things happen too fast for us to process. This leads to us never being able to fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states. "That would have implications for your morality," said Immordino-Yang.

During the study, the researchers shared compelling, real-life stories with volunteers to induce emotions like admiration for virtue or skill or compassion for physical or social pain. Brain imaging scans showed the volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of pain. Of course, when it comes to the rapid stream of news from TV, online feeds, Twitter, and definitely the new real-time interface of Friendfeed, 6 to 8 seconds could feel like an eternity - and a period in which a million new items floated past our field of vision.

We have the ability to sort this flowing information quickly, but developing deeper feelings - the social emotions that define humanity - takes much longer. And who has the time?

Fear-Mongering about Digital Media, Take 3?

Media scholar Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Anneberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC went on to further interpret the findings saying, "in a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in."

We can't help but feel we've heard similar strains of this same argument before. Doesn't it remind you of that old saying "TV will rot your brain?" Or maybe it's a throwback to the worrisome findings from the past decade about how violent video games supposedly lead to actual violence. It seems that our society is always concerned about how digital media will impact our humanity. And there's always a way to show that it has negative effects.

But is digital media really that bad? We think not. Maybe we can't properly feel the correct amount of compassion or pain when watching the Twitter stream update in TweetDeck, but is the Twitter stream really the place to go to experience these emotions anyway?

Case in point, watching the tweets about the Hudson River plane crash was exciting in the sense that we were getting the news first, all fresh, raw, and unprocessed. But it wasn't until later, watching TV interviews with the survivors telling their stories and speaking of the pilot's heroism that the emotions really kicked in. Is that not OK for some reason?

It seems to us that what should matter to humanity is that we do, in fact, still feel things...even if we might not feel them right away from a tweet.

There's really not much to the disstill web application, but that's okay with us. This is definitely an example of how the simplest web apps can be the most useful in the end.

The only thing on the disstill web page is a little slider bar that lets you filter Digg.com stories based on a minimum number of diggs. You just drag the slider to adjust the number of diggs that stories need to have in order to be included in the RSS feed. The low end of the slider is set to 100 diggs and the high end is 5000. Obviously, the higher you go, the more filtered the feed becomes and the more likely you're only going to see the really, really hot stories.

Once you have the slider set, you can either view the page or click "get the RSS feed" to add the customized feed to your preferred feed reader. It's a lot easier than using Yahoo Pipes, that's for sure!

A Couple of Suggestions

Our only complaint about this nifty little web app is that it doesn't let you choose which section the stories come from (Politics, Technology, Science, Gaming, etc.). Instead, it looks at the entire Digg website. We would also love to filter for images and videos, too. Perhaps in some future version, we hope?

At any rate, this is one of those little tools that can end up making your life a little less info-overloaded. And for that, we thank you, Mr. Alex Rabarts. (P.S. Can you build a generic version of this that lets you enter in any URL and then filter by PostRank? That would be amazing!)

Alex also created a nice visualization of Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Hacker News, and Yahoo Buzz that's worth a look. Check it out at oursignal.com.

Ambient News is a new Firefox add-on written by Mozilla developer Atul Varma and is currently available as an alpha release. The add-on tracks your browsing habits, learning which sites you visit most frequently. It then pulls the headlines in from those sites and displays them for you in a beautifully fading list every time you open a new tab in Firefox. If you see something that interests you, just click the link and you'll be taken to the web site where the headline originated. Privacy advocates, rest assured - no data is shared outside your browser.

Intelligent Agents to the Rescue!

As Michael Calore of Wired notes, the add-on is a great workaround for the biggest usability problem facing RSS. "Many people don't know what it is or how to take advantage of it," he writes. "The first hint that a feed exists is a funky orange or blue icon. Click on it and, in most cases, you get prompted to load another application. Sometimes, you just see ugly, raw XML output."

But since we're mostly web geeks here at ReadWriteWeb, we're more enthralled with another aspect to this tool: its intelligence. As we mentioned not too long ago, cloud agents are on the rise. The term, coined by blogger Chris Arkenberg, refers to automated agents that help us better deal with the volumes of data we have to sort through every day. Although Ambient News isn't necessary a full-on cloud agent - it doesn't actually work in the cloud - it can still certainly be considered an agent, especially since it helps us sort through a barrage of information in a new way.

Other Alternatives

Ambient News is not the only alternative to the traditional RSS Reader. Over the past year at ReadWriteWeb, we've also made mention of other alternative news readers like Feedly, which puts a magazine-style interface on top of Google Reader. Another popular RSS reader is Snackr, an Adobe AIR app that scrolls headlines across your screen like a news ticker. Then there is, of course, FriendFeed, a lifestreaming application that's quickly becoming an alternative way to share information among the early adopter set.

Alternative RSS readers aren't for everyone, though - journalists, bloggers, researchers, and the like may still need to use a jam-packed feed reader in order to seek out the elusive info they seek on a regular basis. But for those of you who are more casual web surfers and blog readers, alternative RSS readers are a less stressful way to get your news without the news getting to you.

Given the current economy, there may be fewer applications and services to try next year. Whatever will we early adopters do? We love to flit from service to service, trying the latest shiny new thing, endlessly discussing whether or not it will stick, whether it will "cross the chasm." Without the endless barrage of new services being released one after another, in 2009 we may find ourselves having to more deeply embrace the ones we have left. More importantly, we'll finally have the time to figure out how we can really integrate them (or not) into our daily lives.

As we discover how to better manage the social media apps we added to our daily workflow during 2008, we may end up turning a more critical eye towards any newcomers in 2009. Enriched with a better understanding that doesn't come just from being enamored of "shininess," but from experiences that grew over time, we may question the new arrivals in ways we never did before. What value does this bring me?, we'll ask. Is this really doing anything new?

Thankfully, the answer to that last one will likely be "yes," as the funding possibilities for straight up clones of popular services will probably be dialed back in 2009.

What We Want in 2009: Help Us Manage Social Media Better

For the entrepreneurs still looking to get our attention with the latest social media toys, their pitch may no longer be "come try this, it's new," but instead, "come try this, it helps." Because if there's anything we learned from 2008, it's that social media overload is not sustainable.

Over the course of the past year, we found ourselves drawn to the apps, services, and features that helped us better organize the madness that is information overload. We added our friends to lists in both FriendFeed and Tweet Deck, we categorized our RSS feeds and even cleared out some for good, we de-friended the strangers we had collected on Facebook, we synced our social network friend lists, and we found ways to multi-post to our preferred networks. Yes, we became more efficient..but there's still so much room for improvement.

Our Social Media Wish List

Perhaps next year, we'll see more apps that help us better organize, if not filter, the information we deal with every day. We have some thoughts about what we would like to see and we hope that 2009 will bring these ideas to fruition.

• Google Reader add-ins and/or Greasemonkey scripts:We want Labs for Google Reader! It seems Google is more interested in revamping the Reader UI than giving us any real tools to deal with our RSS overload. If they won't help, then someone else should. We would love to see tools that let us view our feeds based on our attention data, without having to manually reorganize the feeds ourselves. We also want duplicates marked as read - if we read a friend's shared item from a feed we subscribe to, why do we have to see it again as we plow through our unread feeds? Finally, we need tools that let us better filter our subscriptions to reduce noise. Why can't we click a button to hide all the posts where someone has spliced in their delicious links or Twitter updates, for example?
• Auto-categorization tools: We tried to emulate Robert Scoble and what did we end up with? Only several thousand friends whose updates fly by at the speed of light. We tried to organize them into lists, but do you know how long that takes?! What would we would like to see are tools that organize people for you. Is it really so hard? The tools could parse our friends' Twitter profiles, for example, to categorize people based on location, business, or company. All the local people could be in one list. Everyone whose profile says "SEO" in another. Anyone in the top 50 or 100 users (based on followers/friends) in a third list called "noteworthy." Just because we want to customize and personalize our lists doesn't mean we couldn't use a little help getting started with the task.
• More Friend Synchronization tools: We want to friend you - really we do - but it's hard because you're here and there and everywhere. To make matters worse, you don't even use the same username on Digg as you do on Twitter. How will we ever find you? What we want is a tool that allows us to friend people, with one click on all the networks we possibly can, according to our preferences. It should also be able to delve into our social graph and sync up the friends we have already added.
• Friend List Sanitizers: OK, we followed/friended you, but we don't know why. We don't know you, we don't have any friends in common, in fact, we think you might have requested our friendship by mistake. So why are you still in our Facebook friends list? We need tools that help us clean up our lists to remove the accidental "stranger friendings" left over from our MySpace days. Even better, the tool could compare our Facebook list to our FriendFeed or Twitter friends to see if we know you elsewhere in order to determine whether to retain or remove the friendship.

These are just a few social media tools we would like to see developed in 2009. What are yours?

AwayFind is a clever solution to the email overload problem. It lets you step away from your email without missing the most important messages - the so-called "email emergencies." That addresses one of people's deep-seated fears of email abandonment - the fear that some piece of critical information is going to arrive and we're not going to see it.

Basically, AwayFind is an auto-responder on steroids. You can configure its outgoing message to your liking. That message includes a link which allows people to get your attention if they are, in fact, emailing you about something urgent.

Your message could read, for example:

But What If It's Important?

Those who really needed to reach you can click the link to be taken to a web page where they can fill out a quick form, the results of which will be sent to you.

The form is not too cumbersome to fill out, but it has just enough fields to cause people to pause and consider whether or not it's really worth their effort. It also includes a CAPTCHA at the bottom to keep the spammers at bay. The form can be configured so that messages are categorized by the sender via a drop-down box (e.g. "Personal," "Business", etc.) and then those messages can be auto-routed to the appropriate person(s). In other words, AwayFind can automatically delegate your email for others to deal with.

When someone fills out the form, you're alerted based on the settings you chose during AwayFind's setup and configuration. You can receive a text message (SMS) or you can specify to be alerted at a different email account - that secret address you created for emergencies only. You can also check AwayFind's online inbox via the web.

With AwayFind, you can finally enjoy that vacation, to be sure, but you can also set up day-to-day templates to manage the everyday onslaught.

Pricing Info

The AwayFind service comes in two pricing tiers - a free version and a Professional version. The upgraded plan is $4.95/mo or $34.95/year and comes with a few extra features like a branding option which incorporates your logo, SSL security, integration with your web site, international SMS support, and more. It works with Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail/Windows Live Mail, Outlook, and others.

Now that you have all that extra time on your hands, you should probably read AwayFind's guide to not checking email (provided for free upon registration), as it will help you stick with your new plan. Remember, breaking email addiction is something we have to fight one day at a time.

When managing your reading list through the bookmarklet, you now have more options as well. You can view your list as either "normal" or "condensed," select how many items to show per page, open the list in the sidebar, and enable or disable various context menus and additional toolbar buttons.

However, the best feature to come to your reading list is the ability to sort it by PostRank. This functionality, formerly called AideRSS, is something we've been big fans of here at RWW for some time. With PostRank enabled, your reading list is intelligently filtered by popularity. Posts are scored in several ways, including number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, number of diggs, and how many inbound links it has received. So now, you can read your list in order of importance, an especially useful feature for those suffering from information overload.

Other improvements like updated privacy controls and tweaks to existing features round out this latest release, making Read It Later a great addition to your browser whether that's Firefox or IE. Now all we need is an iPhone bookmarklet and we'll be all set.