Comments on: I’ve Deleted All My Alerts And Replaced Them With Filtrbox

By: arinewman120

arinewman120 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:57 +0000

Mark – the system does provide the source, and in all mediums (daily briefing emails, dashboard, and FiltrFeeds) for articles found. I think you may be referring to the search results in the dashboard when you first set up the Filtr, as the source domain is not provided there yet. We'll add that in the near future hopefully; it was left out to keep the search results fast for now.

By: mark

mark — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:57 +0000

why dont they tell you the source of the feed on the results page?

By: Julian Yang

Julian Yang — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

I got the error message as well. FAIL

By: George Morris

George Morris — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

Couldn't I do the same thing using http://NetVibes.com? I can insert a Google widget to search Google News and set it to "apple iphone -firmware". It would produce close to the same results that are in their demo.

By: Kimbro Staken

Kimbro Staken — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

I think you've moved to the status of Slashdot and digg in taking sites down. After seeing your post I immediately went to signup and got "Error, user creation failed. Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction" Hope they get that worked out soon, looks like a really cool service.

By: aziz_griese5636

aziz_griese5636 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

I like Filterbox. Congrats to Ari and team. I know they've been a long time coming.

By: arinewman120

arinewman120 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

Fair question – Filtrbox monitors mainstream sources (not just Google news), blog sources, Twitter, FriendFeed and online news video in one place. You also can consume the articles via RSS (and stick them into a netvibes RSS widget), via Daily Briefing email, or our Dashboard. In order to get the same coverage you'd probably need to set up an entire NetVibes tab with the same searches for different sources in different widgets and then sift through the articles looking for the unique ones. How much is your time worth?

The biggest advantages here are that you have noise control via FiltrRank, easy access to include/exclude keywords to refine your searches (not everyone knows how to structure and constantly refine boolean search strings), and article history. You can easily share articles, share Filtrs, and analyze the content also.
Thanks George!

By: Evan

Evan — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

I work in PR and this service would be great. I signed up for the beta (I think it was the beta) when you posted about them several months ago.

The problem is that their pricing options are extremely constricting. 100 filters would be enough for my company (~25 people/~20 clients) but the 6 user limit is way too low. Getting a Pro account for each user (25 filters) is overkill and presumably much more of a pain to manage (assuming the Team option is good for managing teams). An unlimited option (think 37signals' pricing plans) is probably worth exploring for these guys.

Just my $.02

By: arinewman120

arinewman120 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

Sean – we provide both RSS inputs and outputs. You can add RSS feeds to your account for Filtrbox to monitor (OPML support coming soon) and can also generate custom RSS feeds for the results we find (called FiltrFeeds). The custom feeds can be tuned based on content, # of days, FiltrRank score and number of articles.

By: arinewman120

arinewman120 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

Thanks Evan. Great feedback and this is something we have been discussing quite a bit as we know we need to improve the options and flexibility. I'd be very interested in knowing how you would price it so you had comfortable price points for both individual use and your company.

By: Paul Edmondson

Paul Edmondson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

I set one up for our company and it found good stories that my technorati and google filters had missed. I tried to use Yahoo Pipes for this, but their results are better.

By: Dan Mayer

Dan Mayer — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

Brad glad you could get rid of all your other alerts. I did the same awhile ago. Filterbox was just doing a much better job keeping me informed than my other alerts. The emails each morning are a great way to keep up with things.

By: Patrick_Cameron

Patrick_Cameron — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:55 +0000

Thanks for reporting the issue and sorry for the inconvenience. We will investigate the error directly. We have seen other new subscriber sign ups this afternoon and were able to create your account through the site. I will send you your login information privately.