Andrew Hyde (@andrewhyde) of Startup Weekend and Techstars shows how to customize Filtrs to monitor individual Twitter accounts for specific topics. Check out the video.

Note: A Filtrbox G2 account is required for this hack. If you have a Basic account and want more power and more control, drop us a line and try G2 for 14 days for free!

Filtrbox G2 has just been updated with several new features that greatly enhance the power and flexibility of the service. The major features are the availability of real time alerts, ability to customize the contents of the Daily Briefing emails, fine-grained control over sources, and FiltrRank (all on a per-filtr basis). Internally we’ve been referring to this collection of features as “the scalpel” because it enables you to get very precise control over the Filtrs and your monitoring strategy. There are now 3 dimensions of control over what you choose to receive and be notified on, and this control doesn’t impact the system’s listening and news gathering. Give the the new features a try and see if you can become a social media monitoring ninja! Keep reading to learn more…

Real time alerts
Filtrbox constantly monitors millions of sources for new mentions that match your Filtrs. Now, with real time alerts, as soon as the system detects a new mention, an email alert is sent. Using this feature in conjunction with the per-filtr content control enables you to set up alerts on a per-source basis, which means you can now enable real time Twitter alerts, or alerts JUST on mainstream, highly relevant content.

Custom Daily Briefings
An area of great interest to us at Filtrbox is that of “information overload” and “noise control” as you probably can tell. It doesn’t matter if you are monitoring the conversation on 100+ topics for a list of clients, or tracking a few personal-interest topics. When people are barraged by too much information, we tend to shut down and either ignore things or tune out. The result is that you start missing critical mentions and the tools that were supposed to help you only make things worse. We are working to address these problems for our customers, and this features is something many have asked for. You can have Filtrbox monitor and listen but not include the results in the Daily Briefings. Control what you get in your summary each day, but still sleep well knowing that the system is listening and the information is there when you want to investigate.

Custom source control
There are cases where you might want to set up a real time alert for something on Twitter (but the keyword is irrelevant or too noisy elsewhere), or you want to listen for news on a major company but don’t want to see every single mention published every day. With the per-Filtr content control this is easy to do. You can now control source type (mainstream news, blogs, Twitter), the FiltrRank, and inclusion in the Daily Briefing emails. Here’s what it looks like.

New article display
The Filtrbox dashboard has also been updated with a new article display, so that you can sort through the articles based on source type. This makes it much easier to hone in on articles per-Filtr, and gives a helpful perspective on the conversation happening for each type of content. Here is an example for mainstream news.
 

Twitter view
One of the added benefits of the new article display is a Twitter-only view we have enabled. You can leave this up as a Twitter dashboard, or use it to check in now and then and see the history of what’s been said on a particular topic or referencing anything specific like a hashtag, a user, or a conference.
 

Note: Real time alerts, and custom, per-filtr control is available only in Filtrbox G2. Users of the free version of Filtrbox can upgrade to enable them. Please email sales and request an upgrade.

Log in and give the new features a spin, and let us know what else you’d like to see in Filtrbox G2. We have an exciting product roadmap for the rest of 2009, and always listen to our customers for input.

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We are happy to announce the new Filtrbox learning center. One of the most exciting things about the power of the Filtrbox platform is it’s broad applicability to different markets. To highlight these applications and share best practices for each use case we have started a series of weekly webinars. To see the active webinar listings and sign up for a course click here.

Filtrbox Learning Center

We are pleased to take the wraps off of a great addition to Filtrbox. Thanks to the addition of BackType, Filtrbox now connects and organizes conversations from over 20,000 blogs, social networks, and other social media. Proactive market intelligence is all about being armed with the latest and greatest data so that you can engage better and understand what people are saying, as it happens. Working with BackType made a ton of sense as they do a great job of collecting and organizing the comments from all over the blogosphere (as well as other social media sources) and attributing them to an owner. Full disclosure: both companies are backed by True Ventures, but that is not why we decided to work together.

Filtrbox already monitors millions of online sources including news outlets, the blogosphere and Twitter. Adding BackType to the service addresses an area we’ve been wanting to bolster for awhile, which is the conversations that happen in comment threads on posts and in social media. As you probably know, comments are, by nature, fragmented snippets of information or opinion spread all over the web. Often times there are great nuggets of info (or harsh words) buried 65 comments deep on a popular post. BackType does a great job of organizing and connecting these conversations, and because they also associate the comment with a person, we are able to further Filtr out the noise and deliver critical mentions you would have otherwise missed. Now you can sleep a little better at night knowing that Filtrbox is going that much deeper into the web to bring you the market intelligence you need to stay ahead of the game.

The integration is already live, and you will see articles that come from BackType contain a prefix in the tile with the text “COMMENT:”

As long as you have blogs enabled as a source type in your Filtrbox account, you’ll begin to see these if your Filtrs come up with a hit in a comment. We started to see the benefit of having BackType integrated the minute we enabled it on our development servers; almost immediately we began to discover mentions we would have otherwise missed. Now that its released we hope you see the same.

Here is the full SMR if you’d like more information or a press contact. (PR-speak for social media press release).

As a reminder, Filtrbox offers free 14 day trials of the service. Just sign up here and get started!

We are pleased to announce a new webinar series - “Getting the most out of Filtrbox G2″. Join us for our first webinar this Thursday at 11:00 AM MDT. Patrick Cameron of Filtrbox will run you through best practices, tips and tricks for fine-tuning your account and dialing in your Filtrs for maximum performance. It doesn’t matter if you already have an account, or are just curious to see Filtrbox in action we guarantee you’ll learn something new!

Follow this link to register. http://tinyurl.com/c2oqgp Space is limited so sign up soon! We’ll be posting a full Webinar calendar shortly as well.

We often get asked how Filtrbox is different from traditional RSS readers and aggregators. Here is a quick review of the major differences:

Content Discovery

When using traditional RSS aggregators, the user supplies the list of RSS feeds. This means that the domain of information gathered by a traditional RSS reader/aggregator is limited to the RSS feeds (content sources) that are known to the user. However, given today’s information environment there are thousands of new content sources are being created on a daily basis. Anyone can potentially become a publisher, and it is unrealistic to put the burden on the user to keep up with the thousands of new content sources that are sprouting up each day. Filtrbox takes this burden off of the user’s shoulders and discovers the new content sources automatically. Filtrbox’s search domain covers broad content sources INCLUDING new content sources a user is not aware of.

Additionally, Filtrbox has a provision for the users to add their own RSS feeds of interest to be searched.

Publisher centric vs. content centric

Traditional RSS readers/aggregators present to the user all the content that is published by a specific publisher regardless of whether the user is interested in the content or not. Thus, the traditional RSS readers/aggregators implement a publisher centric consumption model. On the other hand, Filtrbox implements a content centric model. Rather than deliver to the user all the content published by a specific publisher, whether its relevant or not, Filtrbox allows the user to filter for the content that they are interested in from ANY publisher by providing contextual filtrs. The content centric model implemented by Filtrbox greatly reduces information overload because each piece of content is examined and filtered for contextual relevance before it is delivered to the user.

No filtering vs. contextual relevance filtering

As indicated above, most traditional RSS aggregators do not filter the content. All content published by a limited list of publishers is delivered to the user regardless of whether it is relevant or not. Filtrbox provides the user with the ability to better tune the filtering system for contextual relevence.

Relevance Ranking

Traditional RSS readers/aggregators do little to solve the problem of information overload. Filtrbox users have the ability to say “I know there is a lot of information out there, just show me the important stuff”. Filtrbox is able to show “the important stuff” because it ranks articles based on their relevance and importance to the user using proprietary scoring algorithm called called FiltrRank™. Articles with a high FiltrRank™ score indicate articles of the highest importance.

Search feeds on steroids

Some search sites or RSS readers allow you to consume feeds for search results. Filtrbox provides custom feeds (known as FiltrFeeds) that can be added to any reader or aggregator. FiltrFeeds also leverage FiltrRank™ and automatically aggregate the results from the millions of sources Filtrbox covers. This means you get the benefit of contextual scoring, noise control, and automatic aggregation.

Beyond RSS

Unlike traditional RSS readers, aggregators, and content roll-up sites, Filtrbox consumes content delivery formats beyond RSS. Filtrbox is capable of consuming both standard and proprietary content delivery formats.

Not really a reader

Filtrbox is not trying to be a replacement RSS reader or feed aggregator. The service discovers content from millions of sources and delivers it to you via email, RSS or the rich web dashboard. There are some basic article viewing features that are shared with email clients and news readers like mark-as-read, delete article, flagging and feedback, but thats about where the similarities end.

FiltrFeeds (custom RSS feeds) are down for maintenance for several hours as of 6 PM Mountain time, January 22nd. We are fixing an issue that was affecting some of the feeds. We’ll update this post as soon as they are back online. Thanks for your patience!

The rest of the Filtrbox system is online.

Update: FiltrFeeds are back online. Feeds will not be quite up to date for a few hours until our databases catch up but will be totally current shortly.

You may have noticed banner ads in the header of your Daily Briefing emails from Filtrbox lately. We introduced these about a month ago and are now on our 3rd sponsor. We had a few reasons for doing this…

• Filtrbox Daily Briefing emails go out to thousands of professionals every day. These customized emails are widely read and highly anticipated by our users, so they are a great vehicle for communicating with an engaged audience.
• Experimentation - we were curious to learn how much click-through traffic the ads could generate, and what kinds of ads people like the best.
• Requests - we had received a number of inquires about sponsoring our Daily Briefings, and it was something we had hoped there would be demand for.

Note: If you are paid subscriber, your Daily Briefings are ad-free!

We don’t have an Ad page/rate card up yet, but its on the way. If you would like more information on sponsoring our Daily Briefings just drop us an email.

This week we are featuring Lijit as a sponsor. We use Lijit’s search plugin on the Filtrbox blog, and on a number of our personal blogs as well. Their blog search platform lets you deliver better, more relevant results to your visitors (better engagement) and you can now even advertise with Lijit. Many of our customers are bloggers and content producers too, so we think it will be a great match!

In the past few weeks we’ve added two features to enhance our support of Twitter monitoring within Filtrbox.

1. Tweet This - From within the dashboard, you can now tweet any article in your account. Just mouse over an article and you’ll see the new “tweet this” link on the action bar. This is a super-easy way to share articles found in Filtrbox with the Twitter community. All you need is a twitter account, and as long as you are logged into Twitter in your browser it will work seamlessly.




2. Twitter links in your Daily Briefing - The ability to monitor conversations on Twitter in Filtrbox isn’t new, but the Daily Briefing emails have now been updated to show you who posted the tweet. Its also a live link so you can visit that person’s twitter page very easily. Here’s what it looks like in your daily briefing email.

Let us know what you think!

You asked, and we listened! Log into your dashboard and check out the new features we have just released. Many of these enhancements are the result of direct customer feedback, and we addressed a number of issues that have been nagging us too. If you haven’t logged into your dashboard in awhile, take a few minutes and refine your Filtrs or add a new one and give the new version a test-drive. Details on the enhancements follow;

• Improved Filtrs and live search
• Better charting
• Mark-as-Read support
• Delete article support
• Block source
• OPML file import
• Action bar

Improved Filtrs and live search
The way that Filtrbox runs its searches has been improved to provide more accurate and comprehensive results. You may notice some changes in the articles the system finds for your Filtrs. In almost all cases this should be an improvement, in the case of very general filtrs you may now want to refine them further to get more relevant results.

In order to provide better instant-feedback and a more consistent experience, Filtrbox now runs live searches for your Filtrs as you set them up and provides sample results from a broader range of sources. Click and drag include or exclude terms from the tag cloud or add additional terms yourself and click search to get realtime feedback reflected in new sample articles. Check out this quick screencast to see it in action.



Better Charting
This release introduces a new charting component that looks a bit different, performs better, and will offer more flexibility as we expand the display options. What’s new is the date box and calendar pop-up to control the date ranges, and the “show for the past days” box where you can just type in how many days of data you want. Much easier to use than the sliders that were there before.

Mark-as-Read
After you have clicked on an article in the Filtrbox dashboard, the title of the article goes from bold to regular text. You can mark an article as un-read also if needed.



Delete article
There are cases where you might want to remove an article from your account. Perhaps the article is not relevant to your Filtrs, or it’s a splog that slipped through our defense systems. If you are in PR or web marketing and you are using FiltrFeeds, you can also use this feature to cleanse an article out of a feed that is getting published or shared. Once articles are deleted, they are removed from your account and cannot be recovered. There is no “un-delete” - once its gone its gone!

Block source
Here’s another very handy feature that helps remove articles and content you simply don’t want to see going forward. Perhaps you consistently see articles from a domain you don’t care for, or is of little value to you. Just click “block source” and the domain gets added to your personal blacklist.



You can even modify or remove the blocked domains. Filtrbox looks at the FQDN, not just the domain. This means you can block “notagoodblog.wordpress.com” without blocking the entire domain. If you wanted to block all of wordpress.com, you can add this to the blocked domains list manually. You can also modify a blocked domain or remove previously blocked domains. This is done on the Account/Manage Content Sources tab.




OPML file import
Filtrbox already persistently searches millions of blogs, thousands of mainstream sources, and social networks such as Twitter and FriendFeed, but if you want to ensure the system monitors specific feeds you care about, you can add them to your account. Filtrbox now supports OPML file import to make it easy to add a large number of feeds at once. This can be found on the Account/Manage Content Sources tab also.



Action bar
We cleaned up the dashboard a bit by moving a number of functions to an “action bar” that appears as you mouse over each article. From this bar, you can provide feedback, share the article, delete, or block the article’s source.

In addition to these features there are a number of “under the hood” improvements you shouldn’t see, but from which you will benefit. We hope you like these enhancements, and are hoping to hear from you on what else you’d like to see to help you get even more value from Filtrbox! Just leave us a comment on the blog, or drop us a line at support [at] filtrbox.com.