Filttr Blog  who are we?

Filttr has been running for almost 10 years but mostly broken for past few. I have moved on to other products, time to shut this down. Feel free to follow on twitter: https://twitter.com/SwaroopH

It has been a year since our last beta but that doesn’t mean we haven’t done anything since then. There has also been heavy performance improvements. However, our company has been looking forward to move from Filttr over to other things. It was an experiment by Aditya & Swaroop which transformed into a full time project as we got popular – not to forget the first big coverage by TechCrunch followed by CNN & New York Times. However, we hit some roadblocks and then the negative attitude of Twitter towards the developers led us to lose interest in trying to monetize the service. The final nail in the coffin was flurry of decisions by Twitter last month. We will not get into the details as everyone here at RH loves Twitter & the way they’ve managed the service so far.

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!

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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.

Earlier this year, we announced support for tr.im. Unlike other twitter services & apps, we used to shorten URLs only if your tweet exceeded 140 characters. This was done automatically until we introduced a manual “shorten links” button. Few months ago, we added support for tr.im stats which would show beautiful graphs based on the details of who visited your URLs & how.

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!

It’s hard to believe that Summize was a service bought by Twitter. Without Twitter Search, Twitter just doesn’t seem right. Twitter Trends are list of topics that people are talking about the most. Since we brought out dynamic Aliases (based on hashtags/search) in our earlier, we thought it would cool-er if Trends were a part of Filttr too. We added Trends back in June as an optional list.

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!