Coming to my point, our company has decided to move on to other projects & I, Swaroop Hegde, have decided to take over Filttr’s development & server expenses. We have never charged our users and I do not plan to do so either and yes, ads suck! There are no major bugs (tracker.filttr.com) but I will try to add more features (filttr.uservoice.com) during my free time. I’m already in the process of developing FilttrFon – a mobile app for iPhone & Android.

I would be grateful if people can even donate something as little as $5; it will help me pay for some part of the expenses and most importantly, encourage me to continue developing Filttr!

–
Swaroop

P.S. I can be reached at email [at] swaroophegde.com or @SwaroopH

P.P.S. You didn’t think I would actually forget mentioning Star Wars day, would ya? Hint: Check title.

When tr.im made the announcement of shutdown, we were quite disappointed and we switched to is.gd which had been our backup URL shortening since the very beginning. Later announcements of tr.im’s revival did make us happy but the stats system still hasn’t come back. So we’ve decided to move on to j.mp (an alias of bit.ly).

All URLs will now be shortened by j.mp only. We will soon be adding URL statistics. Follow @Filttr for more updates!

Even after linking them to dynamic Aliases, Filttr users felt something was missing. Some trends just don’t make sense (read: dubious hashtag, etc). Clicking through points to a bunch of tweets but unless one could find a valuable tweet, it doesn’t quite help. We had been monitoring a 3rd party service called WhatTheTrend.com for a while. In simple words, it’s a Wikipedia for Twitter Trends. The community helps add content to each trend and it allows everyone to know why a topic is trending on twitter. We added an option last month – a question mark next to each Trend. Clicking it queries the wonderful service (WhatTheTrend) and display the data. Whether it’s Follow Friday, #iranelection or Kayne West; anyone using Filttr is the first to know!

This time, we go a step further. We show you notifications on your desktop without having the browser open; thus saving you all of screen area and allowing you to concentrate on your work much better! Here are three awesome ways to get more out of Filttr.

Fluid App

Fluid is a cocoa app (exclusive to OSX Leopard) by Todd Ditchendorf which allows one to create SSB (site specific browsers).

When launched, Fluid displays a little tiny window where you specify the URL of a WebApp you’d like to run in a Site Specific Browser. Provide an application name, specify a Location and an Icon, click ‘Create’ and you’ll be prompted to launch the new native Mac app you’ve just created.

Growl Notifications

When you get a new tweet, a growl notification is shown.

Growl Notifications

Dock Badges

This provides a true count of total number of unread tweets across all windows/tabs regardless of no. of aliases open!

Dock badges

Requirements:

OSX Leopard
Growl (recommended)

Download: http://www.fluidapp.com/dist/Fluid_0.9.6.zip

Yip

When Abhimanyu Raja released Yip, a Firefox addon (extension), we @Filttr finally found a way to support desktop notifications on all major OS’s. It works just fine with OSX, Linux and even windows.

Although OSX users are treated with growl, notifications on Linux and Windows aren’t as pretty. However, Ubuntu (a famous Linux distro) has shown much interest to support Yip and we are expected to get . One of our  developers is also working on adding support for Growl on Windows. *NEW* Swaroop Hegde has contributed code into Yip to support Growl for Windows.

This how notifications show up using Yip on OSX, Linux and Windows:

Yip on OSX

Yip on Linux (Ubuntu)

Yip on Windows (using Growl for Windows) *NEW*

Requirements:

Firefox (3.5 recommended)
Growl on OSX (recommended)
Growl For Windows (recommended)

Download: http://blog.abi.sh/yip-0.1.xpi

Growler

Growler is a plug-in for Safari by Aditya Mukherjee, who also co-founded Filttr! It’s only supported for OSX but the source code is open and hence we expect someone to release a windows version soon.

Once installed, you’ll receive growl notifications for incoming tweets.

Growl Notifications

Requirements:
OSX (Leopard recommended)
Safari (4.x recommended)
Growl

Download: http://code.adityamukherjee.com/growler/Growler.dmg
Note: V1 is no longer supported.

—-

We allow customization of all three. You can find the link under “Customize” or on the sidebar on any settings page. You can also toggle notifications  Let us know what you think?

Firefox > IE

Solution? Firefox, a browser supported on all major operating systems – Filttr works best on it. Oh, we love Safari and Chrome too!

To get started, login to oauth.filttr.com, click settings (at top) and select facebook (on the right). Here are the options you can chose from:

• All tweets are sent to facebook
• All tweets are sent to facebook except if they end with #fb
• Tweets are sent to facebook only if they end with #fb

You may also temporarily disable the feature; such as when live tweeting an event. We do not post @replies and Direct Messages. If you don’t want to show hashtags on facebook statuses, select the “strip hashtags” option.

Note: You MUST remove Twitter’s official facebook (or others such as Selective Status) integration to avoid double posting.

Happy Filttr’in!

Let’s start with the good ones first.

oAuth!

It’s hard to be on Twitter for a day without hearing about oAuth at least once. After all, it is being touted as the messiah to solve all user security issues related to Twitter. Although the release into beta, and then going public has been very haphazard. Some people have it, some people don’t. The ones who don’t, think they do because they hear it from the ones who do. The ones who do, have problems with it because it is still in beta. While that jumble goes on, the API consumers (read: apps and services like us), have had to deal with figuring out which problems were due to Twitter, and which bugs were at our end. Multiple points of failure always make things very hard.

But, we’re glad to say that we’ve managed to implement a fairly robust authentication system based on Twitter’s oAuth, and plugged in the holes that we could in Twitter’s API (at our end). The result is the rebirth of Filttr’s authentication system.

We now have Filttr credentials. You no longer need to use your Twitter credentials. All you have to do, is signup with Filttr – that is, create a new account with a username and password (which is not your Twitter username and password) – and using oAuth, link your Filttr account to your Twitter account. You’re done! In fact, we went a step ahead to make it easier for everyone. You don’t even need to have a Filttr account to use Filttr. We have a special ‘Quick signup’ for all you finicky folk who just want to see what the fuss is about. Understandably, this experience is severely crippled because we cannot store any settings for temporary users. Which means if you use the quick signup to use Filttr, you will not have access to Keyword blacklist/whitelist, Aliases, our infamous instant messenger bot or mobile interface, and other things that we’re known for. Not to mention, you will have to go to Twitter everytime, to give us access to your data via. oAuth.

In case you don’t want to fill a four field form, we also support OpenID. Just use your OpenID provider’s URL, and we’ll take care of the rest. Now you can sign in to Filttr, the way you want to!

We think having an account is just so much cooler. You get access to all our interfaces using just one set of credentials. You’ll get the whole Filttr goodness in all its glory. Dare we say you will never have to sign in to Twitter again! If you’ve already been using Filttr, just sign up, and we’ll port all your data over to your new Filttr account. Easy as pie.

Go ahead, give it a whirl!

Features and improvements

We never get tired of adding new things, or improving old ones. Doing a feature by feature comparison of what Filttr has to offer to the general Twitter user, we can confidently say that Filttr’s web interface is the best there is today. And it becomes better every day. Just ask our users.

We completely revamped our mobile interface some weeks ago. We began dropping support for older WAP based mobile browsers in favour of better and powerful smartphone browsers. This gives us way more leg room to move about than the WAP browsers would have. Mobile browsers are all upping their game thanks to competition from iPhone Safari, and we’ve decided that this is the place to be.

We added threaded replies, just like what you’ve become used to on the main web interface. We added Aliases, ability to search, ability to see older tweets and did a complete visual overhaul. It looks and feels much cleaner now. The layout should suit all phones, whether you use it in landscape or portrait mode. So if you’re on the move, give Filttr Mobile a try. It’s the most usable mobile interface for Twitter there is.

As far as the main web interface goes, our biggest addition was OS X Growl style notifications for replies from non-friends. We realised that having multiple tabs open might not be okay with some people. And of course, we don’t want to miss replies to ourselves. So we decided to bring the unobtrusiveness of Growl notifications to the web. You can toggle a button if you want to see replies from people you’re not following, right on your main timeline. You can reply by clicking the reply button in the notification. It’s really useful when you get the hang of it.

Making Filttr play better with other sites and media (apart from text), we now have image previews! Currently we support Filttr Gallery pictures and TwitPic — the most popular way to share pictures on Twitter. You don’t need to click away to another site to see what the picture in conversation is all about. Any Filttr.net picture or TwitPic link will first show you a small preview, and if you want to see the bigger picture, clicking the thumbnail will take you to the original page. This will save you time, and bandwidth — plus, the tweets will continue to flow without interruption.

We also added the ability to change the behaviour of virtually any part of Filttr. Right from disabling keyboard shortcuts to opening links in new windows. What’s even more awesome is that these settings are persistent. So it doesn’t matter which interface you’re using to access Filttr and read your tweets. Whatever was your preference for the main interface, will be reflected in your mobile interface as well. How’s that for convenience? Filttr can do this because we’re more than just one app. We’re a collection of apps, and hence a service. We believe it’ll become clearer to the people why Filttr is so much better as time goes on.

For our more technically sound folks, a geekier changelog is here.

The not-so-good news

We’re lagging behind on our desktop application. It’s taking longer than we expected because we want it to be absolutely awesome right from the first day. Bringing it into this world when its siblings – the web and mobile interface – have such amazing reputations, is not easy. Then of course, is the competition with other applications out there. We just want you, the user, to have the easiest, best, and funnest experience that we as programmers and designers can give to you. We hope you understand.

So, this has been a long chit-chat. You can see that we keep busy making sure everything runs smoothly for you. But we miss things too, and love to hear from you when you have an idea for us. Our Uservoice page is still up in full swing, so drop by if you have something for us. We’re still @SwaroopH, @aditya and @filttr on Twitter, so you can always reach us there.

Happy Star Wars Day, and thanks for using Filttr. May the 4^th be with you!

Now, with that out of the way, let’s get started with what’s big this time around. Let’s take these one by one.

Filttr hit big!

Yes, we were pleasantly surprised when Filttr was featured on Techcrunch, albeit with a slightly misleading title (but hey, we’re not complaining). We saw our user base shoot 10 fold thanks to it, and almost everyone was very happy with what he have to offer. Sure, this was about 2 weeks go, but the great thing is that word really spread, and now we see a trickle of new users everyday trying out Filttr and recommending it to people. We hope this growth continues, as we work to add more and more features that’ll make Twitter that much easier for you.

Our first casualty

We had to sadly remove our desktop application a couple of days after the Techcrunch bonanza. While we loved it, we realised that it was not up to par with the Filttr experience we want to offer everyone. Hence, we removed the old application and immediately began working on another one that is going to be better, faster and more feature rich than any other Twitter application out there today. It’s going to remain very easy to use, non-bloaty and did we say fast? We will no longer be using AIR, so that we can leave that overhead behind. We are switching to a better technology, that help us maintain and add features to the application at a frequent rate.

This was a necessary step to avoid falling into the same pitfalls and many other applications have. We did not want legacy code to weigh us down, and a platform roadmap that we weren’t in control of. All this goodness is going to take a little time though, but bringing the application back is our top priority at this point. So hang on, you’re going to absolutely love this new application.

The train-ride continues

But our absolutely awesome web interface continues to be developed and improved with new features and performance boosts. For our more technically sound folks, a geekier changelog is here. But here’s a simpler, more-than-brief low down on all the goodies!

• Enhanced Replies: Yes! This was one of the biggest requests ever since we went live, that you wanted to see replies to you along with your regular stream. Well, we always like to do that extra bit to make things more than what others make of ‘em. So, we decided to boost your regular replies with any mention of your name in the whole Twitter sphere. It doesn’t matter if that tweet is a reply to you or not — as long as someone mentions your username, you’ll get to see it. How do you like them apples?

• Aliases, not groups: We’ve revamped our Groups, so that they’re not groups anymore. They’re the most powerful way to receive information there is amongst any other Twitter client today. Aliases are a combination of search and friend groups. You can create an alias with search terms to keep track of those words in the entire Twitter sphere — being able to absolutely pin point what you want to see, and not see. Using the advanced options on the Settings/Alias, you can construct the alias that you want, choosing words you want to see, and words you don’t want to see. You can also choose if you want to search the whole of Twitter, or just what your friends are saying. You can select all your friends, or some of your friends. It is completely upto you, with no restrictions (not from our end, at least). You’re going to love these way more than groups. Believe us! If you find it a little complicated, head over to the Settings page, and things are explained in much more detail.

• Tweet Attachments: Why just express yourselves in words, or pictures for that matter? Now you can upload audio, as well as video files! With decent limitations, you can now share yourself in many different ways. Completely asynchronous, like everything else in Filttr, you won’t have to leave the page to upload something. Convenient? We thought so. Just click the paperclip icon next to the tweet box like you do normally to attach pictures, and instead of picking an image, pick the file you want to upload.

  

  Oh, and speaking of attachments — you can now see who is talking about that particular attachment right on the page. For example, if you go to this attachment, which is a screenshot of a Twitter goof up with @SwaroopH’s stats, you’ll see at the bottom the tweet that talks about that attachment. This will help you keep track of who all find your attachment interesting. Swell? Great!

• Keyboard Navigation: Since we removed our application, we decided to make our web interface feel just like an application so that you don’t miss it too much. We add a bunch of keyboard shortcuts to make sure that you’ll (almost) never need to use a mouse on our pages again. Click on the ‘?’ icon under the attachment icon to get a list of these shortcuts. They might take a little getting used to, but when you do, you’ll see that you really can’t live without them!

  

• User Badges: Tired of clicking away from Filttr just to see information about another user? Well, no more! Now, clicking on any user’s name or handle will show you their info right there. You’ll see their full name, location, their bio, latest tweet — along with if they follow you or not. You can follow or unfollow them right from that box, so you never have to leave Filttr if you don’t want to!

  

• Link Information: The tradition of shortening links is both a good and a bad thing. We don’t like the fact that the destination can be obscured by just shortening a link to it, and you’re clueless as to where you’re going before you reach. So we decided to show it to you. Holding your mouse over a link shows you exactly where you’re going to end up. We also re-link the link, so that you are not redirected from the URL shortening service’s page. Less re-directs mean lesser time to reach wherever the link is supposed to take you. If the link is to a media file, we show you the size of that file so that you know exactly how much you will be downloading, before you do. It’s really helpful!

That’s six new things, but these are only the new features! There have been many more improvements to performance and speed under the hood – so the pages should seem snappier than ever before!

oAuth

We have been silently testing our oAuth-based user registration. While other apps can simply create an association with your Twitter account, we cannot – because we’re more than just your average app. Hence, we will continue to have our own authentication system, which will be your credentials to access Filttr. We will link this account with your Twitter account, so that there is a two-level security layer. And you can seamlessly use our different interfaces by using just one set of credentials. If you move from your computer to your mobile phone, you can just go to our mobile interface, use your Filttr credentials, and start using Filttr. No need to re-authorise or jump through more hoops. We believe this is the most convenient way to offer you the Filttr experience, and it goes along with our plans for the future.

oAuth will be revealed whenever Twitter takes it out of beta. We’ll be ready!

We’ve decided to stop saying that we’re not going to add any new features, since we’re obviously not going to stick by it! Coupled with our new way to roll them out, we hope you’ll always keep a look out, waiting for the next big thing! As usual, if you have any ideas and/or suggestions in mind, don’t hesitate to let us know. Have a good day!

While we had decided not to add any new features and only work on stability after launching ßeta³, we couldn’t help ourselves. Public beta, or ßeta⁴ as we call it internally, has a few updates that we think you will find useful. Here’s a list of our changes in this release for the technically inclined.

IM updates

Our IM bot has seen quite a few stability updates, so that it can handle many queries without slowing down. We had some initial troubles, but thanks to @ankur (our IM/XMPP lead), all of them were solved very quickly. With stability, comes some new features. You can now save your searches, so that you can easily execute them by calling an easy to remember alias. Sort of like smart folders. We have plans to improve this feature to make it really useful, so give it a go and let know how it works for you. We’ve also improved the !whois command, so if it was giving you troubles before, it won’t now.

Desktop Application updates

Filttr Desktop Application also sees some minor updates. These are mostly to do with the application behaving a little erratically on non-Mac OS’. You won’t see major changes here, but it’s still really awesome to use!

Mobile Interface

We’re finally ready to reveal our mobile interface. Yes, we’ve had it for a very long time – it was there when we initially went into beta, just not advertised too much since we wanted to test it before actually releasing it. It offers the same tabbed interface we’ve come to love, and shows you your filtered tweets, replies and direct messages. It allows you to retweet, reply, message people with handy links. It’s a mobile interface that doesn’t suck! So if you’re on the move, give it a whirl!

General Features

So, throwing our initial plans of a feature freeze out of the window, we’ve added source filtering and phrase black/whitelisting. Phrase black/whitelisting improves upon the initial keywords. Now you can add a whole phrase (that can include special characters) instead of a word, so that you can be really specific in what you want to or don’t want to see. You can also filter tweets by the source they’re coming from. For example if someone has hooked up their FriendFeed account to Twitter, which hoses a bunch of updates at regular intervals, and you don’t want to see them – just go to your Settings/Keyphrases page, and add ‘friendfeed’ to the list of sources. You will no longer see updates from FriendFeed. Ain’t that rad?!

We also overcame technical limitations in our groups implementation, so that you can now add about 100 people to a group. We believe this will make groups even more useful for you.

And for the final icing on the cake. Filttr now supports photo uploading! Simply click the paperclip icon on web, or the browse button on mobile to specify which file. Type out your tweet as usual, and send it. We’ll take care of the rest of the headache for you. If you don’t want to put the URL of the image at the end, but somewhere in the middle, just add a {url} (including the braces) in your tweet, and we will replace it with the actual URL. Easy peasy!

So now that we are opening up, our attentions will be exclusively on stability. But don’t hesitate to shoot feature suggestions our way if you have them. We love to hear from you! So, thanks again for all the love – we’ll see you on the other side of this week with an update on how things are going. Cheerio!

Full Instant Messaging support

Yes! Filttr is bringing back IM to the Twitter world. We’ve added enough features so that you won’t have to ever open a browser or an app to interact with Twitter. Send and get updates, including replies and direct messages, user information, and … wait for it … search! You can search Twitter directly from within your messaging window. Just give it a query like you would normally give to Twitter Search, and voila!

Begin by enabling IM for your account at our Settings page by first entering your Twitter password (which we need to get your timelines from Twitter) and then the GTalk/Jabber address, where you want these tweets. Filttr Bot will add you as a friend and send you an activation link to confirm that you are the owner of that address, which if you click should take you back to the Settings page and tell you that everything has been verified. If it doesn’t, something went wrong. Try enabling again, and if you have trouble after that, let us know – we’ll have a look.

If everything goes dandy, the bot will tell you that IM has been activated and give you the list of commands you can use. It will send you your tweets, replies from your friends and direct messages at regular intervals of one to two minutes. You can use the commands to get any of those out of turn, if you want.

We also have an easter egg hidden here, so if you find it, do let us know. We have something special in mind for the first one to guess what it is.

Uni-timeline, conversations and groups, oh my!

We gave you a killer web interface in ßeta², but weren’t happy with just that. At Filttr, we’re all about focusing on what is important, and we want to give you the best of every interface that we provide. Hence, we went back (again!) to the drawing board, and decided to come up with something that would help you focus more. The result was Groups! Now you can form groups of users, and just get updates from those users without having to deal with others. This is perfect for times when there are big events going on (like WWDC), and there are some people live twittering the event. Just put them all in a group, and keep that group open in a tab. Presto! Of course, the use cases go way beyond something so simple, so we urge you to find creative ways of using these groups to further enrich your Twitter experience.

And, further improving our existing self-refreshingly awesome interface, we now have conversation tracking as well. Whenever someone replies to another person, you will see both the tweets – the reply, as well as the tweet that was replied to. It helps to not lose yourself in the middle of a conversation and wonder what you said, or what is being replied to. It’s so helpful, you’ll wonder how you got around without it. Along with that, we now have direct messages in the timeline as well, so that you don’t need to have an app open. Just keep the Filttr web timeline open, and direct messages will show up as and when you receive them, along with your normal tweets. Of course, replies and direct messages are now highlighted differently so that you can make out what is what with a simple glance. Replies are yellow, and direct messages are green.

Our desktop application

Not impressed with either of the above two (shame on you!)? How about using the smallest full fledged Twitter desktop app ever? We have notifications – visual and audible, intra-timeline search – that searches through the currently shown timeline, resizing – so that you can see more or less, whatever you’re up to, and keyboard shortcuts! At just under 175 KiB, our desktop application is really fast and has a very small memory footprint. It supports multiple accounts, favouriting and retweeting.

We’ve worked hard to make it an absolute delight to use, even though it is in beta. We hope you like it.

Phew! This brings us to the end of the rapid fire feature additions we have been doing since Filttr went out in beta. For a more technical view of feature additions, feel free to roam about our bug/features tracker. We will now be concentrating on stability of these features, as well as final preparations to go into public beta. While we can’t put a date on it, we hope it happens sometime soon. Response to Filttr remains gratifying, and we hope you have as much fun using all the features as we had building them for you.

Hope the new year is treating you well. Until next time!