Filttr Blog  who are we?

3… 2… 1… *beep*

  • 08:48:57 pm on January 24, 2009 | # | 0

    Today, we’re hitting a big milestone in our Filttr roadmap. We’re opening up signups for everyone, and going into public beta. The last couple of months have seen Filttr grow from being non-existent to showing up on different stats – ones that track Twitter application usage. Even though we were in closed beta, we were ranked higher than more than 70% of the apps*. That is truly awesome! Thank you for all the support!

    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!