Content Curation World

Happy Friends is a new free tool created by Dave Winer which allows you to closely follow those Twitter accounts for which you don't want to miss a beat. 

Happy Friends makes it easy for you to add (but not to delete for now) any Twitter account you want and to easily expand it to see all of its most recent tweets. 

The result is a simple interface which lists your favorite Twitter sources and allows you to check rapidly what each one of them has posted. 

What may escape anyone not reading this, is that by clicking on any of the headlines displayed inside Happy Friends you get to see the full Twitter card display, just as it was intended to be seen on Twitter with integrated images and video. 

Happy Friends fulfils for me a true need, as with Twitter typical readers and tools (including lists) it is very difficult to track specific sources postings without doing a few click acrobatics. 

I hope that in one of the upcoming versions, the formatting of the tweets will also be improved as to make it easier for the eye to rapidly scan the information presented. The twitter grey icons on the left do to little to quiet down the noise created by all the the tweet texts and links appearing on the Happy Friends page. Vertical spacing between items and separating text from links would significantly improve legibility and rapid eye-scanning of the content.

Very useful.

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://happyfriends.camp/ 

See also: http://happy.smallpict.com/2014/06/24/welcomeToHappyFriends.html 

and: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2014/06/28/happy-friends-turns-twitter-mailbox-select-friends/ 

Automattic, the company behind WordPress has just released a tool which allows WordPress users to curate real-time news coming from Twitter and YouTube video clips without ever leaving the standard WP posting dashboard.

From TheNextWeb: "Akin to having Storify right in your WordPress platform, users can click on the “Add Media” button while they’re editing a post and see options to insert either a tweet or a YouTube video.

Being able to embed social content like this isn’t new — both Twitter and YouTube have made it possible for a long time, but WordPress is now streamlining it so that you can simply query based on keyword, hashtag, user, or geographic location, and it will populate the relevant content."

My comment: Sign of the times. Soon most publishing tool will integrate curation facilities that allow easy searching and integration of excerpts from articles, videos and other content types into original content. The WordPress Media Explorer confirms this trend while providing thousands of small independent publisher with ready-to-use simple curation facilities.

N.B.: At present the Media Explorer is available only for WordPress.com users, but it will be soon available as a Jetpack also for self-hosted WordPress sites.

Find out more: http://en.support.wordpress.com/media-explorer/ 

If you find tracking news on Twitter a difficult task due to the amount of stories showing up, and the often missing context helping you understand the value and relevance of what is being shared, here is a new tool that may help you quiet down the visual noise and find more rapidly what is really important.

Vellum is a new free web app born out of a quick experiment at the New York Times R&D labs which allows you to see all of the most relevant Twitter stories coming from the people you follow, stripped of their commentary and showing their original title, description and source.

Vellum filters out text only tweets that contain no links and surfaces only those tweets that have already been retweeted by multiple people in your network.

"Vellum acts as a reading list  for your Twitter feed, finding all the links that are being shared by those you follow on Twitter and displaying them each with their full titles and descriptions.

This flips the Twitter model, treating the links as primary and the commentary as secondary (you can still see all the tweets about each link, but they are less prominent). 

Vellum puts a spotlight on content, making it easy to find what you should read next.

We also wanted to include signals about what might be most important to read right now, so links are ranked by how often they have been shared by those you follow on Twitter, allowing you to stay informed about the news your friends and colleagues are discussing most."

An excellent news discovery tool for content curators.

Useful. Easy. Free. 8/10 

Free to use.

Try it out now: http://vellum.nytlabs.com/mylinks 

More info: http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/04/25/vellum-a-reading-layer-for-your-twitter-feed/ 

See the etymology of the word Vellum

Twitter has just announced the availability of a new feature that will be gradually rolled out to all Twitter users and which allows you to create custom curated Twitter channels on any topic you want.

But you need not wait.

To start using immediately Twitter Timelines what you need to do is to head over to https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ and to register yourself for the free web app owned by Twitter.

Once you are logged in, all you need to do is to click on the leftmost vertical icon-bar on the + sign, and then to select Create Custom Timelines from the ensuing dialog box. 

Once you have created a Custom Timeline all you need to do to populate it is to manually drag tweets from your others news/tweets gathering columns into it.

Once created in Tweetdeck any Custom Timeline is immediately visible inside Twitter at a dedicated URL and can be easily shared or embedded inside any site or blog.

My comments: The Twitter Custom Timelines feature opens up a universe of possibilities for curated news channels, and other highly specialized thematic channels. Finally there is the opportunity not to have to consume stories and news that are completely irrelevant to your interests simply because they come from someone you follow. By following highly specific custom timelines it is now possible to consume only the type of content you are truly interested into from your favorite trusted curators.

Free to use.

Try it out now: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ 

Check also: https://blog.twitter.com/2013/custom-timelines-in-tweetdeck