Filttr Blog  who are we?

Since we went into beta about three weeks ago, we’ve faced a lot of confusion, prejudice as well as grossly un-informed guesses as to how Filttr might be working to do what we promise – make sense of your Twitter stream. Most people who join us think that we’re a simple friend-rating based system, owing to our iconic sliders; tweets from friends with lower priority get filtered more often than higher prioritized ones. While this is true, because let’s face it, that is the definition of priority, a lot *more* happens in the back to decide which tweets do get pushed through. A simple exercise to see the non-priority part work is to set all your friends to ‘normal’, and visit your timeline. You will see tweets still getting filtered. How does that work?

Filttr Artificial Intelligence (or FLAI, as we lovingly call it), is our smart engine working at the back to constantly understand what interests you or catches your fancy. While I cannot explain exactly how it goes about doing that, let’s just say it is a pattern recognition system. Looking at your tweets, replies and favourites, FLAI tries to determine all that it can about you. Then, when a stream of tweets comes in, it sets about comparing those patterns to this stream, ranking the tweets based on their relevance to you. Then a few basic sorting techniques later, your stream is ready to be pushed to you.

When you sign up with us, we tell you that your keywords are being generated. That is when FLAI sets about performing all sorts of cutting and dicing around your timeline. From then on, every time a tweet goes through us, it passes through FLAI so that it can add this new information about to what it already knows. That’s why, it’s a little important you send your updates through us. By doing that, you’ll be helping FLAI stay up-to-date on you. That’ll result in maximum accuracy.

We have big plans for FLAI, where we hope to make it accurate enough so that you won’t have to look at your normal Twitter timeline at all, and trust what it shows you. While we add all sorts of features to Filttr, at its core, it is still a way to cut out the real conversation and important stuff, and everything aside, FLAI remains a work in progress we are proud of.

And you thought it was all about pushing a slider back and forth, didja?

It’s been a week since we last updated everyone. Right after the first release, we went back to the drawing board with a bunch of new ideas and requests that everyone who signed up in the first beta had for us. While we had prototypes ready for most of those features, we decided to step on the gas and get them out to you before the holidays really kicked in and we went our merry way. So here we are, with βeta²! We’ve added some changes under the hood, so if you were with us for the first release, you will notice some differences. There are many changes in the web interface as well – including an auto-refreshing timeline and more ways to tune your Filttr experience – which is why we put together a quick screencast for our old and new users alike. We hope you enjoy it. It’s a quick primer on how to get started.

We’re also sending out our first newsletter, exclusively to our current users. Also, we’re sending an invite which they can give to someone to let them join us. It’s our little thanks for being with us from the start, and a way to share the love! So if you missed out the first time around and want in, catch one of these first timers and pester them for one. It’ll be worth it!

We hope you enjoy using βeta² of Filttr as much as we enjoyed working on it. Tweet tweet!

O hai! Welcome to the Filttr Blog.

Filttr is going into closed Beta today, and we decided it was high time we had a place to tell people what was happening on this side of their computer screen. We’ve been stealth for a long time, and are really happy to finally see this day. To start things off, let us explain what Filttr actually is. We realised that it might not immediately strike why you would need a service like Filttr.

We love Twitter, and it’s speed, spontaneity, as well as versatility. Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people, but that can be a problem sometimes. There are times when someone uses Twitter in a way that you don’t like, or the conversation is really going out of hand and you can’t understand a word of what’s happening with tweets flying left and right. When there’s a lot of noise, and it don’t hear good, who you gonna call? Well, you call us.

Filttr steps in to cut the chatter down to a manageable level, so that interaction isn’t a pain. We have complicated algorithms in place to show you only what we think is relevant to you or you would like to see. It’s all realtime, so we’re always learning and improving to provide you the best (which actually means the least, since we’re cutting down the hullabaloo). Basically, it’s a lot of really cool magic happening behind the scenes.

Over the next few weeks, as the service grows, we will talk more about the mechanics, and how you can make best use of Filttr. So happy filttr’ing, and don’t forget to give us feedback at our Uservoice page (or just click the ‘feedback’ badge on the left).

Tata!
The Filttr Team