Twitter Link Page
Last week, I was at the gym going through my twitter followers on my phone and coming across so many links that I wanted to click on. But being on my phone, I was reluctant to click on the links and live with the 30 seconds of wait time that is the mobile web (at least on my phone).
So I started thinking that I needed a web app just for links and then tweeted this message:
party twitter app that builds a link page based on my follows? If not,
someone should build it. It would be my start page.
And of course, someone did build it. A bunch of people built something based on that tweet and I have not done a good job of keeping track of them all.
The first one to get my attention was built by Doug Estadt and was custom built for me. Here it is. Doug, who is also behind DateTwit, has now "commercialized" the app he built for me and it is called Twitrollr. Although the functionality is the same in my custom app and Twitrollr, I vastly prefer the UI of my custom app.
The next one to come to my attention is called Tweetlinx. It does basically the same thing but the UI is a bit different.
And then Ivan Kirigin, who created TipJoy, tipped me off to Tweetsip which uses the Hacker News UI. I like it very much.
Ivan also pointed out that these apps are quite easy to build and will likely end up being a feature:
something this". That's because it's a compelling app. Look for it in
twitter clients soon. Someone should just build it up as a service to
feed into the clients, to make it another column in tweetdeck.
I think I'll continue to use my custom app for now since it works best for me. But there are some other good options out there for others who want an app like this. And hopefully we will see this offered as a feature in twitter clients soon.
The fact is that twitter has become the best source of links for me and, at times, I am too busy to go through my entire feed and just want the links. Now I can do that. Thanks to everyone who hacked something together based on my tweet. If I've left anyone out, please leave a link to your app in the comments and I'll revise this post to include it as well.
Update: Here are some additional apps that were mentioned in the comments:
Comments (Archived):
Thank you for addressing this Fred. You certainly know how torecognize a need, invite information and SHARE it.I appreciate that because everyday I see folks being discrete (selfish)in solving needs.Your thinking is the real ‘open web’ :)Good health,@Ed(Hi Ivan)
well i appreciate your comment very much Edbut i also am fortunate to be in a job that incents me to do stuff like this
you can also just use a filter of “http://” on tweetdeck, thats works for me. i find myself having the same inclination, twitter started as 99% talk, 1% links and that has now flipped. nobody cares what people are saying anymore, they just want the links. it’s kind of sad.
i don’t agree. i find the talk on twitter very entertaining and informative.but sometimes, particularly when i am rushed, i just want the links
i enjoy it too, that’s not what i intended to say. i was making an observation that there is a so much demand for and response to link filtering (twiturly, etc.) lately. don’t you at least agree that link sharing has surpassed and now dwarfed thought sharing on twitter over the past 12 months?
I think only 20-30pcnt of tweets contain linksBut you are right that twitter is getting very link driven
Twiggler (http://www.lmframework.com/… lets you filter tweets for links, in addition to a whole host of user specified authority fields.
davidi’d be happy to link to twiggler on the front page of this post, but not ifits in private alpha. when do you plan to open it up?
Thanks Fred.We don’t have any immediate plans to open it up, we created it to show what could achieved just by using the inherent functionality of the browser (no plugins). If you think it’s misleading here, then feel free to edit my post.Our core business is the framework, not the apps it generates.
Got it. No need to edit anything. I just wanted you to know why I’m not likely to link out to it right now
Totally cool – would not have expected it anyway.
What I really want to see is an unfollow filter. And a block filter. Anyone who uses the words “check this out” should go into a column for me to select all and blast! @journik
Try twanquility.comThat might help you with your desire to shut certain ppl up
Funny that while you wre asking for it, I was working on a similar thing I had in mind for a while now: a twitter link agregator with capabilities to fetch hastags as well, and push everything to your favourite social bookmarking site.
Good ideas
http://tweetlnks.com/hash/It's the same idea as links, but just hash tags.Next is to create personal trends and then mash them all together into twitter dashboard to show links, hashtags and trends.
Anyone else using “Favorites” to tag links they want to follow-up on using their desktop system? It is functional but I end up with multiple pages of high-quality links which I am constantly endeavouring to reach the bottom of. So in addition to battling my way to a zero-Inbox policy, I am fighting Twitter-link overload. With that said it would be impossible to personally aggregate all of that information, so in this case quality far outweighs the management cost…however I’m not sure the same logic applies to my Inbox!~Steve
I do that sometimes and based on the way my tweets get favorited I think many ppl do that
I still can’t get over my belief that such apps should live on a (preferably cloud-fed) browser.
I don’t use desktop clients but I think the more ways to use twitter the better
totally totally agree. i hate downloading huge adobe air apps. i will always choose 90% functionality of a desktop app if it can be done with ajax. i’ll throw flash in there too. more clients is not the answer to anything.
My fav app here is microplaza.com – only web based but works briliantly and you can view from other peoples perspectives too.
CoolI’ll check it out
I’ll second Microplaza. It may be exactly what you’re looking for Fred. It only lists links from people you follow, but for those links, you see the total number of times they were tweeted. You can create sub-groups from your Twitter list as well (“tribes”). That way you peruse tweeted links that are likely more targeted around specific subjects.
Thanks to Nigel and Hutch for mentioning MicroPlaza!If anyone is interested in receiving an invite code, just follow @Microplaza on Twitter!
“twitter started as 99% talk, 1% links and that has now flipped. nobody cares what people are saying anymore, they just want the links. it’s kind of sad.”I’ve almost always posted up to 90% of urls … only recently I also started to RT some tweets, otherwise I could have claimed even some 95%
btw- Tweetlinx has updated their UI and added pagination and RSS. I like it.The big theme here is that we’re increasingly shifting to reading people-centric feeds (which Steve Gilmor alluded to in his heated RIP RSS post a few days ago), and this kind of app makes it easier to consume content that way. The simplicity here is the sticky part.This has incented me to re-asses the # of accounts I’m following, so that it’s reasonably readable and more useful, instead of being a river of news. I might even consider having 2 Twitter accounts: 1 personal, strictly people-centric where I follow and get followed, and another one where I read Rivers of news and I only follow.In my opinion, getting too sophisticated in applying filters is premature to Twitter streams, as it’s very erratic. One day, someone might say “check this out”, but the next day they might send a useful gem. The idea is that people-based filtering should do a good job overall, and it will lead you to unexpected knowledge or other people discoveries.
Fred, i know of a new service coming out of France that will be online soon. I will share the link when i hear. but from what i understand it is a killer experience. way above what i saw in your post.
Please send it my way
Twitrollr is great. If it had an RSS feed it would be awesome.I tried to contact Doug Estadt to tell him that, but the contact, about, faq, feedback and all other buttons were broken.I know it’s new and everything, but if you don’t have a “feedback” page, why put up a feedback button?
scodtt, so sorry but i didn’t know it was going to be announced today (thrilled it and datetwit both were, thank you again fred), and so i was building a fancy interface to add all the text. am handcoding it now. please email me now at recruit x wsw.com the handcoded text will be there in 2 minutes.
This realtime launching of businesses is rough!Good luck launching it, and building it! I have high hopes!
LOL, you said it, but also so much fun. already have someone working on your rss idea. thanks again.
Doug, It might be useful to have opml as well- as it provides flexibility in splicing the feeds. Thanks 🙂 (no fries, pls)
Oops. I didn’t know those services weren’t ready for prime time doug. Sorry about that
no sorries ever needed, was fabulous thing of you to do and very much appreciated. both were ready to go, just had to rush in a few contact details on twitrollr.
Good point!
Hey Fred,You missed one. http://www.cubbyscott.com/Post about it here: http://bit.ly/fzkPmSean
This one is awesome because it already has the RSS feed.I couldn’t tell from the site, however, what’s the difference between “popular” links and “latest” links. They look like the same list in the same order to me.
Popular deals with links posted by multiple of your friends within the last 24 hours. If there aren’t any retweets in your timeline, it will look the same as latest.Thanks for checking it out. We will be cleaning it up the design and adding more features soon.
Ahhh, makes sense.Looks cool now, don’t worry too much about the design.Funny to think that I’m “old school” because I like RSS, but I do like it because of NetNewsWire.Thanks!
ThanksI’ll get it added to the post when I get to a computer
Twitrollr links aren’t working.
richard, could you please email me and tell me what sort of prob you’re having? recruit x wsw.comthank you.
Sorry about that
I have an alternate solution to a link aggregator: How about a lightweight BlackBerry app (I say BlackBerry because you and I are both Curve users) that allows you to configure the BlackBerry browser to open links using Google Wireless Transcoder (or similar service). I’ve generally found GWT to load most web pages quickly on my Curve and I can almost always get to the content easily, even if the layout is messed up. This would allow you to click out to links when you want to see them rather than building up a queue that become another inbox to manage.
I’m not familiar with GWT. I’ll have to check it outThanks for the tip
I’m not sure how you access Twitter on your Curve (TwitterBerry?) but you can actually see GWT in action with the mobile web client Slandr (http://m.slandr.net). They transcode all links in tweets with GWT. The downside of URL shorteners in this case is that it’s one more server request which degrades load time somewhat (more on mobile than on PC probably).
I use sms
We do this on stocktwits per stock symbol. So if I tag a tweet with $AAPL and share a link related to the story, we un-shorten the url and list it on the ticker page here: http://stocktwits.com/t/aapl (it’s in the right hand side bar under the heading “twitter links”.
You are way ahead everybody with stocktwits soren
I’d like to get my twitter links and trends in a daily email. I’d like to see the original tweets, for twitpics to be previewed, and for links to be shown unshortened along with the page title… And I’d like fries with that.Real-time / stream-based is great, but I’d prefer a daily summary email I could filter, archive, and search through later. I thought I saw something similar, but can’t seem to find it now. Does it exist / would anyone find it useful if I built it?
Do you like your fries thin or thick? 🙂
I built a handful of these type of apps as well out at http://www.halfbite.com (all built prior to your tweet actually) — you can get a list of links from your timeline, you can see what words you (or a group of users) tweet the most, you can see what two people are talking to each other about via twitter, and a bunch of other things like that…It’s all mostly just stuff I hacked together because of requests like yours from other people, so it’s not really meant to be commercial or anything (and honestly not sure how well it would scale to gobs-o-users), but it’s out there if anyone wants to play around with some additional things…
Thanks
kevin – i checked out halfbite. it’s cool but i am hesitant to recommend it on the main page of this post because its not really the app i was looking for. but there are a lot of interesting features in it.
Hey thanks – yeah it’s a little different than the specific things you wereasking about, I just mentioned it as more of a f.y.i. for you than anythingelse…honestly I’m not sure it could handle the traffic from a headlinepost anyway ;-)Thanks for checking it out though…and let me know if you would like to seeany of it’s features expanded on or beefed up to a more ‘production capable’version…
Well, Fred, I have to wonder why you don’t do something much simpler, and that’s just read Twitter on the web at those times you are sitting at your computer or have your laptop. Because then your whole page is in front of you with the people you are following and the @s, and you can see all the links on one full page, and click at will. Of course anyone who sent you an @ is there to be seen any time, and if you read the page a few times a day, you can generally see a lot of people anyway unless you have zillions of followees.Because…while it may seem fun at first to press on every link, it will get tiresome. Do you REALLY want to spend you day reading what *other* people are saying and not thinking in solitude yourself, and writing your own ideas? You can spend hours clinking from one link to the other, but ask yourself: did you really get value from the list of things like that you were clicking on?Well, now that you have this customized toy, I hope it has a “history,” so you can go back and look at all those links, and see whether it was all worth it, chasing them. Maybe not!
I don’t have a lot of free time and anything that can insure I don’t miss the most important stuff is valuableI get the tweets on my phone and enjoy the serrendipity and conversation I get from themBut I do need to see the most important links that are being passed by my friends
I agree that an app like this saves time and helps cut down on some of the clutter…What might be an interesting ‘next’ step would be to have some intelligent filters applied to this new app…basically have it index the content the links point to and do a bit of sorting and organizing into topics of conversation…so you could get an even quicker view of the ‘topics’ people in your time line are talking about (and also purge down duplicates and/or tangent bits of information that is more fun than relevant to a hot topic)…I think I might have to add this to my ‘things to work’ on list as it already closely relates to another little side project myself and some friends are working on 😉
Fred,We at Gist have done this for links contained in your email inbox. We now have the tweets and plan to group those links into the stream as well. Thanks for the idea.
Cubby Scott looks interesting because of the RSS feed. Baking that back into a platform like TweetDeck would be great.Also, with the indexation of links that’s happening, I’d love to see a system that allows me to track subjects of links – so I could track links about “venture capital” and group them. Both from my followers but also non-followers. This would help even further, because even tracking links alone can be overwhelming with the # of them being tweeted. Search on keywords in tweets isn’t enough b/c the tweets might not have the right keywords. And I don’t even care about the text of the tweets (or necessarily about popularity) – just the meaning behind the links.
I agree
fred,i also wanted to share our startup http://www.all140.com with you.we are trying to build a really efficient real time news mag
ThanksI’ll check it out