May 28th, 2008 by morganb
Welcome to TweetSmart - a new Twitter-driven site that was built on a simple principle: there is a lot of good stuff out there that we're (or I'm) not seeing on a regular basis. I realized that I share most of the cool links that I come across in my Twitter feed to my friends and followers. How cool would it be to be able to take that activity and amplify it by allowing those shared links to be shared by anyone that wanted to see them?
That's how it started. So Steve, Paulo and I built TweetSmart to allow people to send links to TweetSmart to share with other folks. By sending a simple Twitter direct message to TweetSmart the link-sender can specify a category for the link and attach a message to it (up to 140 characters including link of course!). Users can then go to tweetsmart.com and see the latest, greatest links of the day in the master TweetSmart feed and quickly puruse links of interest based on category.
So for example I find a great link on TechCrunch, I can send a direct message from Twitter to TweetSmart such as "d twsm technology great article by techcrunch on Twitter: URL" and then that message shows up in the Technology category in the TweetSmart feed.
Hopefully TweetSmart amplifies all of the link sharing activity going on across Twitter by letting people see and share more cool stuff with more people.
We chose direct messages because in order to dm someone in Twitter that user needs to be following you. This isn't to keep people from using TweetSmart, but rather it allows us to keep some control over spam. If someone is abusing the TweetSmart main feed we can un-follow them and exclude them from the feed.
If you'd like to be able to post to TweetSmart send us an email or simply follow the user 'twsm' on Twitter and we'll follow you back - then you'll be good to go.
We're not done.
We're working hard on improvements including the following: category-specific and main feed RSS feeds, voting features, and some work on the colors of the icons (the purple is especially tough). If you have features or functionality you'd like to see added please let us know in the comments or via email.
Thanks for checking us out!
Yeah, some of the colors are a little harsh and I see a few layout things that need to be tightened up... that's why the web is always in "beta" ;-)