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.

Reminder: Clear your browser cache before logging in!

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.

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.

Today we received a special treat from one of our younger fans! It was too good not to share…

Looking for a good time on Sunday night? Come join Filtrbox and other great Colorado companies at SXSW!

What: Colorado Interactive party
When: Sunday, March 15th 8:00 PM - 4:00 AM
Where: Pure Volume Lounge - 229 East 2nd Street
Why: Meet some good people, some cool companies and have a good time, on us!

If you are there, hit Ari on twitter or brightkite for more info.

Sponsors:
PocketFuzz
OneRiot
Double Encore
Lijit
Filtrbox

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.