For the last year and a half, we’ve been working hard to develop technology and tools to help people tame information overload and Read What Matters. But the problem most folks have goes deeper than just overflowing RSS readers.
Blogs, articles, tweets, instant messages, FriendFeed threads, Facebook wall posts — all sources of potentially interesting or banal information, and all of them come from people. Our biggest problem now as online information consumers is not the information itself: it’s our unruly networks.
However, we’ve listened to your requests, and we’ve created an amazing tool to help: PostRank Relationship Manager. This person tweets a lot — is her stream worth reading? I haven’t talked to that guy since high school — do I want to approve his Facebook friend request? I stumbled across a great blog post — but was it a fluke and most of the time the site’s content is irrelevant to me?
Now PostRank answers those questions for you. We’ve adapted our core technology to analyze how people use the engagement metrics we track.
Determine if a person is worth following on Twitter based not only on how much they tweet and re-tweet, but also by how much your networks overlap and how often your existing friends engage with that person.
Figure out if you and that girl you had a crush on in freshman year will have anything to talk about, or if your Facebook news stream is just going to get clogged up with her stupid quiz results and pictures of her cats.
Installing our new Relationship Manager extension is as easy as a couple of clicks and only takes a minute. At present, we only support Firefox, but are working on versions for Safari and Chrome. We tried to develop for Internet Explorer, but the extension just kept telling us it wasn’t worth our time.
Once installed, the Relationship Manager extension will help you Read Who Matters on blogs and news sites, in Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Talk, and Facebook. We’re currently working on expanding the functionality for MySpace, Windows Live Messenger, and Skype. We’d love to get your feedback, so if you have other social media tools and sites you’d like us too support, please let us know!