This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

I’m always interested in new Twitter tools, so when I heard about Filttr, I set out to try it out. Filttr claims to make sense of Twitter by filtering out the tweets you don’t want to see and leaving only those you do want. Before logging on, I took the eight screenshot tour, which highlighted some of the main features. While this was interesting, I soon realized I would have to try it out to really understand it. In fact, the helpful box explaining the functions on each page was much more useful. You can turn this off once you don’t need it any more.

Your Timeline

Sign in with your Twitter credentials and you get a timeline, and there’s one major difference from Twitter that’s immediately apparent. Where someone has replied to a tweet, that reply is shown beneath the tweet. Reply, retweet, DM and favorite buttons are shown next to each tweet. Within your unfiltered timeline, some tweets may be hidden but you can see those with a click of a button.

Killer Feature

A great feature is the enhanced replies view where you can see replies to your tweets and mentions of you in the Twittersphere. There’s a similarly fascinating alias feature which is intended to combine users and search terms to focus your search. I got error messages when I tried to use friends’ Twitter names as a starting point for a search, so maybe there’s still work to do in this area.  The friends list also took quite a while to load.

Settings

It’s worth clicking on the settings link to change how your tweets are filtered. This determines what you see in your timeline and allows you to decide which terms are whitelisted and blacklisted. For example, I have whitelisted ‘freelance’ and ‘writing’ to give higher priority to tweets that contain those words.

Another killer feature is priorities, where you can go through your entire friends list (if you have the time) and decide whose tweets are more important. For those in a hurry, you can just search for the usernames you want to prioritize, adjust the slider and presto - you have a filtered timeline. This is a great idea, but I found it took a while to respond.

The Verdict

My overall impression of Filttr is that it has great potential, but there are still some kinks to be ironed out. With the team working feverishly on interface enhancements and a new version of the desktop app, this is one to watch.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com
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