PostRank

I attended the Branham 300 Awards reception in Waterloo last night where AideRSS/PostRank was named one of the Top 25 Up and Coming technology companies in the country! w00t!

Being recognized with any kind of an award is always a thrill, and once again we’re humbled to be included on a list with a lot of other great companies we know and respect. It’s further validation that we’re doing something that matters to more than just those of us who work here.

Branham did a really nice job of thoroughly analyzing the Canadian tech landscape and the complete list of winners is included in the latest edition of Backbone magazine.

Huge thanks to our strong community of users and supporters who continue to like what we do and offer us great feedback. We’ve got so much more on tap in the months to come that we hope the awards keep rolling in!

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!

“Canada’s Web Conference” takes place in Toronto next week, and the PostRank crew will be there!

meshU takes place the day before the main conference, and at 9am Ilya will be presenting there on Event-Driven Architectures.

The main conference takes place April 7th and 8th, and on April 8th at 4:10pm, Carol will be presenting on the Bootstrapping a Startup panel with Mic Berman (Embarkonit), Keith McSpurren (Cover It Live), and Michael O’Connor Clarke (Thornley Fallis) moderating.

Come on out and say hello!

This morning TechCrunch published an article by Brian Solis entitled Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere? It was a great read not only because it nicely illustrates how the Web is evolving into a highly flexible and inclusive organism, but also really validates the reasons behind our existence as a company and what we’re working on. (Thanks, Brian!)

Technorati gets a lot of flack for the shortcomings of their service, (they did respond to the TechCrunch article). From our perspective, however, Technorati was the best tool for what it measured in its time. But times have changed, and links are but one of many important metrics behind the big picture of publisher/audience engagement now.

(more…)

We’ve added a team calendar widget to the right sidebar of the site, which will feature the events the various AideRSS crew members are attending, speaking at, etc.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be at:

• SXSW
• Scotland on Rails
• Golden Gate Ruby Conference, and
• meshU

  If you’re out and about at any of these events, be sure to say hi!