Two startups aimed at tackling the problem of excessive noise on Twitter are combining forces. Twitter-powered new reader StrawberryJ.am is partnering with tweet-scheduler Buffer to surface the top stories in your social stream each day and tweet them at regular intervals.
Think of StrawberryJ.am as an automated curator of stories in your social stream. Its algorithm finds what the people you are following are tweeting about them presents them to the user in a manner reminiscent of Reddit or Digg, though combined with the social graph, the way XYDO does. You can then load those stories into your Buffer queue and they will be tweeted throughout the day. StrawberryJ.am is offering beta invites to ReadWriteWeb readers. Check after the jump for information.
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Tools For A Curated Web
Curation (or aggregation) has been a Web buzzword for a couple of years, thanks to the explosion of blogs and social media adding amazing amounts of content to the Internet. Whereas “aggregation” used to be considered a dirty word among journalists, “curating” links and information in a tactful and professional manner is considered a public service. Andy Carvin of NPR is a great example of the approach to reporting and tweeting news. Maria Popova, the editor of Brain Pickings, has a great look at curation as authorship today in a guest post at Nieman Journalism Labs.
StrawberryJ.am and Buffer are complimentary pieces in the puzzle of a curated Web. StrawberryJ.am surfaces content using your social stream and Buffer helps you spread tweets linking to it throughout the day. The companies make perfect foils to each other. See the announcement on Buffer’s blog for details on how the two will integrate together.
Strength In Numbers Against the Competition
The startups will need to find some strength in each other because the curation and tweet-scheduling landscape is crowded. Outside of normal news readers like Feedly and Google News, StrawberryJ.am must contend with the likes of iPad applications Zite and Flipboard that use semantic social data to uncover content. Then there are Digg (yes, it still exists) and Reddit, Summify and XYDO in the space. Buffer competes against popular platforms like TweetDeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite along with tweet schedulers like Twuffer, Later Bro, Twaitter, Future Tweets and Tweetsqueue.
We wrote about Buffer when it launched a few months ago. Directly after our post went up, Buffer was contacted by Ryan Sarver, the director of platform at Twitter. Sarver said that Buffer was among the apps that third-party developers should be creating, (which was covered by The Next Web). For a startup with two founders under the age of 24, that was good news. Buffer was then contacted by reputation ranker Klout for possible collaboration and now it is partnering with other startups. Things are looking up for founders Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich.
As a special offering for ReadWriteWeb, if you sign up for the public beta of StrawberryJ.am on Friday you will be approved on Saturday June 11 with up to 500 invites.
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