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.

"WeÔøΩre viewed as a Web 2.0 poster child (and subsequently pegged for representing many of the things broken about it). Following OÔøΩReillyÔøΩs Web2.0 Conference it seemed that the phrase became a dirty word ÔøΩ as a catch-phrase, once it caught on with a wider audience it seemed to lose all relevance or meaning whatsoever.. Not like it makes much difference, but weÔøΩve had a ban on the phrase in our office stemming from around the same time."

Nice monitor! Photo by foolswisdom

I'm quite happy for Flock to go back to their Open Source roots and shun the Web 2.0 hype machine. No use going the Kurt Cobain route and letting the meatheads and metalheads get you down. But don't hide behind your Mac monitors too much, guys - the Web 2.0 community still loves you! :-)

UPDATE: Ben Barren tried to shield my eyes from this horrid picture, bless him, but I couldn't resist peeking...

Noooooooo....

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Microsoft Live wrap-up

The big news of the week was Microsoft's announcement of Windows Live and Office Live. My post entitled Microsoft Livens Up Web 2.0 summarized all the news and my thoughts. Here are some extras and links, to wrap everything up for the week:

• On ZDNet, I compared the 'personalized start pages' of Microsoft, Google, Netvibes - and concluded that Netvibes can teach the other two a few lessons. Microsoft's live.com site in particular needs a lot of work.
• Mini-Microsoft was uncharacteristically generous in his/her praise: "To me, we're filling the Alpha Geek void for Microsoft technology. We're providing an alpha-geek portal and set of services for them to build new, interesting results on-top of our services and gadgets and all that other cool stuff."
• Markoff at NY Times echoed my own views: "... [Live is] an important step in extending Microsoft's reach beyond the desktop PC to smart phones and other Internet-connected devices."
• Om Malik mapped Microsoft's competition and his post comparing MS to Macys is also worth a read.
• A lot of designer folks rather unkindly compared Bill Gates presentation style to Steve Jobs (no contest, of course - and that's the way it should be).
• Finally a big thanks to Mike Arrington and Dan Farber for the excellent real-time notes at Microsoft's announcement, also Niall Kennedy for his outstanding annotated photos of the event (I borrowed some pics from Mike too).

Flash Maps and the Mechanical Turk

No that's not the sequel to the Jude Law movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It refers to the two other talking points of the week - Yahoo's new Flash-powered Maps product and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. TechCrunch had the scoop on Yahoo Maps and also covered the Turk. Mike's been on top of his blogging game these past couple of weeks! 

Mechanical Turk is an Amazon.com web service that enables users to "complete simple tasks that people do better than computers [and] get paid for it." It took me by surprise because a) it was the first new thing we'd seen out of Amazon for some time; and b) what an innovative thing it is too!

Amazon was one of the first 'Web 2.0' big companies to emerge, in the mid-90's - if not the first. They were ahead of the curve in rolling out large-scale user-generated content systems, affiliate services, and APIs. So the Mechanical Turk may well represent the next generation of Web as Platform systems. We won't know for sure until we see if people actually use it, but I'm pleased to see that Amazon still has the developer edge to try new things.

Web 2.0 meet-ups all over the world

Gerald Bauer emailed me to advise of a free monthly Web 2.0 event series over in Canada (Vancouver, BC) organized by the Vancouver Web 2.0 Forum. Here are the details.

Over in the Valley, there's an upcoming BrainJams event called Making Web 2.0 Relevant. It's on 3 December at SRI in Menlo Park and the theme is translating human needs into web 2.0. These are the folks who brought you Web 2.1 in SF and they're sponsored by TechCrunch and Zazzle amongst others. I hope there'll be some serious podcasting going on, so I can listen in!

Closer to home, my cousins in Australia are getting into the Web 2.0 BBQ spirit. Ben Barren advises of a Melbourne BBQ on 11 November, as part of the Long Tail Camp. Paul Montgomery discusses the beer etiquette involved in this event:

"The most popular beer at the event will be a key metric for the eventual fate of Web 2.0 in Australia. VB: not good, a sign of it being dull and low key. Stella: not the best either, indicates too many dilettantes. Heineken: cripes mate, stick to Aussie beers ya galah. Foster's: stop pandering to American stereotypes of Australia, no one drinks Foster's here. Carlton Draught, Cooper's Pale Ale or Cascade Premium: now you're talking, champ... dot com 2.0 millions await!"

Strewth mate, I drink Stella Artois! I guess that makes me a dilettante. Oh well, put another shrimp on the barbie and save a place for me at a BBQ soon. Melbourne is where Web 2.0 is at in Australia, plus I've been there before and it's a great city. So I hope to visit again in the near future. 

2.0 Blog of the Week

I'm going to do something a bit different this week. Usually I do a Post of the Week, but how about a Blog of the Week? This week I want to highlight Supr.c.ilio.us: The Blog. In a phrase, these guys are Snark 2.0. They keep us Web 2.0 pundits honest and make sure we don't take ourselves too seriously. 

I first noticed Supr.c.ilio.us a few weeks ago in one of my vanity feeds, when they made some snarky remarks about me. So of course I had to subscribe. And I've since become addicted to their fine brand of snark. Here's one of their recent posts, a definition:

"user created content
Abbreviation. Refers to users that do not receive health benefits, steady paycheck or attend the company’s x-mas party, yet are able to use a networked computer. Tracing back to the days of AOL, the term has been made derogatory (wikipedia? that’s user created content!), only to be revived recently (we scale by aggregating user created content globally and presenting it locally). Often found on CL, social networks, and splogs." 

Also check out their meta tagging site, Supr.c.ilio.us. Keep up the great work guys.

That's a wrap for another week!

"The idea that human judgment can improve a search engine's automatic findings is hardly new. From the dawn of the Web's history - that is, over the last 15 years - companies have invented tools to help users assess the quality and relevance of information, often by relying on others' opinions. Examples include Amazon's user reviews, eBay's feedback ratings and "trusted networks" created on many sites.

What is different is Yahoo's systematic plan to build "community intelligence" into nearly all aspects of its operation - and in turn, to entice users to spend more and more of their time on Yahoo sites, where they can see Yahoo ads. The clearest example, of many I heard about, can be seen at http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com, the beta version of a new search site."

(emphasis mine) Also a couple of great soundbites from Yahoo! staff:

"We're really about getting the average consumer to move their lives online."

"The value of the system is in the aggregate."

The word "system" was mentioned 8 times in the article - not sure if that was the NY Times reporter's particular obsession, or the word was used frequently by the Yahoo! people he interviewed.

Amazon describes it thusly: "...when we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?"

So here's my list of Web 2.0 things I want done, that people could do for me better than computers could:

10. Get an A-Lister to link to me every day (probably can be solved by someone doing various small favours for them, on my behalf).

9. Manually filter my Rojo account at least daily - especially removing the duplicates from my topic feeds.

8. Translate all the best Asian Web 2.0 blogs into English (seriously, I want someone to do that!)

7. Insert Technorati tags and all that other microformat crap into my posts.

6. Enter my blog details into the Ping-o-matic page whenever I post something - and while you're at it, submit my posts to Digg and Slashdot.

5. Click on my Google ads from time to time.

4. Listen to all the podcasts that I never have time to listen to - and report back to me with a summary of what they said.

3. Cook me some spicy noodles, the way Jing Jing in Palo Alto makes them.

2. Turn up to the TechCrunch BBQs on my behalf and constantly remind people that I'm the Father of Web 2.0.

1. Convince a Silicon Valley company to sponsor my US work visa.