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 now supports real-time alerts for all of our content sources. This means you can set up alerts for Twitter (as well as the millions of other sources we monitor). The system will send you an email alert as soon as a new mention is found. There are a ton of useful applications for this feature, but here are a few essentials.

• Company monitor - set up an alert for any mentions of your company on Twitter. Even when you are not being spoken to with an @reply, you still see the mention.
• Vanity Search - set up two Filtrs for this one, one for your name (use quotes!) and one for your twitterID. The problem with desktop tools or Twitter search is that they are only working for you when you are running them and interacting with them. With Filtrbox it’s set it and forget it. What I love about this is that even when I’m running around to meetings, the alerts are in my inbox and I don’t have to waste time in multiple apps looking for the mentions.
• Lead Generation - search for a phrase or a hashtag that relates to your business. Monitor the conversations in real-time and tweet back when folks are looking for solutions.

Please note that a Filtrbox G2 (paid subscription) is required to access this feature. If you have a Free account and want to upgrade, please get in touch with us.

Instructions

1. Log into your G2 account
2. Create a new Filtr, or use an existing one
3. Enter your search term in the “find articles about” box. If its a new Filtr hit save!
4. Check the “enable realtime alerts” box

5. Tune the Filtr’s sources and minimum rank. If you just want alerts for Twitter, uncheck the Mainstream and Blog options. You can also uncheck the “include in daily briefing” if you don’t want the results coming each morning in addition to the real-time alerts. Save the settings.

Click on the thumbnail to see our own company monitor:

If you have any questions on the setup let us know by leaving a comment or question here.

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 excited to share some good news for Filtrbox customers. Today we are announcing a partnership with NewsGator Data Services to further expand our content coverage and giving you yet another reason to sign up with Filtrbox and engage in the conversation!

NewsGator has an impressive 4.9 million feeds indexed, and adds 9 million articles a day from their sources. That’s a lot of content! We have completed an integration that allows our service to monitor the NewsGator repository for new mentions related to your Filtrs. This means that you only get the new, relevant articles that match your Filtrs without having to sift through tons of feeds or irrelevant articles.

Last week we announced that Backtype comments had been added to the system, and now with the addition of NewsGator our coverage has never been better. If you are already a Filtrbox customer you don’t have to do a thing, NewsGator content is already live and will be categorized by Filtrbox as Blog, Mainstream or Social just like all of our other articles.

The full press release is on NewsGator’s site here.

We’ve got more product news coming soon, so watch this space or follow us on Twitter for updates.

You asked, and we listened!

We launched Filtrbox publicly seven months ago, and have been constantly impressed with the wide variety of ways people use the service. Improving knoweldge and increasing productivity are the dominant themes, but the specific applications are almost endless.

One of the things that came through loud and clear (thank you for all of the feedback!) was the desire to do more and not be limited in what or how much could be Filtr’d. Our customers love the fact that Filtrbox does the work of churning through millions of sources to find the proverbial “needle in the haystack”, but they needed more.

We have been working hard over the last few months to build out an entirely new version of the Filtrbox service. We also wanted to provide unlimited usage, and given the economy, offer even more value. So we slashed the price in half too. You can see our new pricing model and feature set on the signup page. Give a free 14 day trial a spin!

We also heard from dozens of businesses and individuals that the service was paying for itself by delivering crucial nuggets of information. We call this Proactive Market Intelligence and believe it is a significant departure from the traditional way of absorbing information.  Instead of reading the same sources and hoping that you’ll come across that must-know nugget of info, Filtrbox covers ALL sources (well, almost) and delivers the crucial information to you.

We have already received some great feedback on the new dashboard and the application but of course we would love to hear from you as well.  Drop us at line and let us know what you think. Stay tuned for another post detailing everything that is shiny, new and different!

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.

As you already know, Filtrbox is hiring! So are at least 19 other hot startups in the area, and that’s why we got together to sponsor the Boulder Job Fair (check out http://boulder.me for the scoop and apply directly on the site!). Great people make great companies,  so naturally we are looking for smart and motivated people to help us achieve greatness!

Apply on the boulder.me site, and if selected you’ll get a free trip to Boulder where you can meet the companies (including Filtrbox), check out the town, and see for yourself why the start-up community is growing and thriving here.

The Job Fair info  is on the site above, but here’s the 411 on Boulder:

• Ideal location - less than 1 hour from an international airport,  30 mins from Denver, close to world-class ski resorts, Rocky Mountain National Park, and more miles of hiking, biking, and climbing trails/routes you can imagine.
• Boulder has over 300 sunny days a year
• Easy to get around - everything is “10 minutes” away. Ditch the car and ride your bike, ride the bus, or walk! My stop-and-go commute in the bay area was over an hour, now I ride my bike 8 minutes to the office.
• Smart - with a high per-capital college degree population, the university up the street, and tons of smart developers and entrepreneurs running around town, there is clearly something in the water.
• Healthy - Boulder consistently ranks as one of the healthiest towns around. Between the Flatirons teasing you every day and the thousands of bikes zooming around, Fourteeners in your backyard, and trails everywhere it doesn’t take much to get motivated to go explore.
• Opportunity - take a close look and you’ll see there is a wide variety of industry-leading companies that call the Boulder-Denver area home. There are so many cutting-edge tech industries represented in the area; biotech, nano-tech, clean tech, aerospace, storage, web 2.0 sites, content/search, sports technology, activewear, and web marketing and design.
• Community - Yes, we are competitive, but this is a very collaborative community too. We support each other and thrive on seeing other local companies do well. Check out Techstars, the New Tech Meetup, the Open Coffeee Club, the Blogger Meetup or one of the 20 other weekly/monthly community events.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch chimed in too!

If any of this sounds good, and you want to make a big difference at a growing company then you owe it to youself to apply at http://boulder.me and come see for yourself. Perspective is good. A free trip to a great place that could land you a new gig is even better!

We love the community we work and live in, and could not think of a better way to give back than joining the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.

Through a stock donation, we are able to be philanthropic and supportive of the community while still using our capital for building the business. To us its a win-win, and we are happy to join the other great companies in the program.

The EFCO program is cool because it creates a great, low-risk, low-cost way for companies like Filtrbox to set up a potentially highly valuable donation.

The foundation does a better job explaining this on their website:

“Colorado has a vibrant entrepreneurial community. A group of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, lawyers, and The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County have created the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado to work with local entrepreneurs to help endow Colorado.

Since entrepreneurial success is uncertain and the vast majority of entrepreneurial endeavors fail, we decided to approach the problem in a unique fashion. Rather than wait for success to encourage philanthropic activity, at which point the successful entrepreneur is likely to be besieged by requests, we decided to create a new program to help all entrepreneurs contribute early in the creation of their companies to the long term health and sustainability of Colorado.”

You can read the full news release here. The team at Filtrbox is committed to building great software, and we hope to someday repay the community that helped us achieve our goals!