I have some more news on Fraggl, the Twitter curation app I'm launching with the good folk at AdaptiveLab. We've now been live with an alpha test of the service for ten days and the feedback has been extremely positive from the alpha group, which I'm really pleased about. Right from the beginning our vision has focused around getting the right combination of human, social and algorithmic curation. It's been a real challenge to create an algorithm with the right mix of signals to successfully surface content which is representative of what the community has found interesting enough to share and talk about, and whilst it's not yet perfect it already seems to be creating lots of value for people.
We've already made some key developments since we started sending out our first emails. As well as fixing a couple of bugs, we are now able to include images sourced from the content which helps gives some more context to the links. We always name the source of the content, but have now made only the headline featured in the email clickable in order to keep it nice and clear how you can get to it.
We've also received some good feedback from our alpha testers which has informed our product backlog prioritisation. As a result of this we've already tweaked our 'I Must Share' button to pre-populate Tweets with the headline so that it's as easy as possible to share, and we'll be tweaking the algorithm a bit, and applying a filter to weed out any auto-tweeted content (Foursquare check-ins and the like) just in case. And we're now working on the website and developing a mobile friendly, responsive, single column version of the newsletter. Once this is all done we'll be going live with our public beta product, so exciting times. If you'd like to sign up for the beta, you can do so here.
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