It’s been a little while since I’ve last written a post. Not that I haven’t had anything to write about, I just haven’t had the time with all the hectic things going on right now. I have, however, been posting a good amount to the Cool Tools Lineup.

So, be sure to check it out or even subscribe if you’d like; it’s an ongoing, short & sweet list of ‘cool tools’ that I come across online. Alternately, you can follow me on Twitter since every time I make a new post to the Cool Tools Lineup, it’s also posted on my Twitter account.

Today I came across NoiseRiver, which I wanted to check out a little more since it’s a FriendFeed tool. It’s a really great noise & user filter plus, I love that fact that I can “love, hate, or not care” about any entry (you’ll see what I mean below).

In their own words:

“NoiseRiver is not intended to replace FriendFeed, it’s an experimental service still in Beta stage of developement that aims to extend friendFeed with some cool features like ranking on your interests and/or your feelings about other friendfeed’s users.”

To get started, you simply enter your FriendFeed username & remote key. If it’s your first time logging in you’ll see a message that says, “Hi (your username here), it seems that it’s your first time here. Go and setup your interests and neighborhood preferences, so you can have a better and personalized experience!”

Setting up your interests is very easy & the setup reminds me of another site I’ve tried out - though I cannot for the life of me remember what the site was. Anyway, all you have to do is type in keywords and use the slider to specify how much you love or hate that keyword.

You can add as many keywords as you want by clicking on “add a new keyword“. Also, you might want to totally block out a certain keyword, which you can do as well by setting your prerefence for that keyword to “complete hate“.

The neighborhood works pretty much the same as the keywords except you add nicknames instead of keywords. So you would type in the nickname of a FriendFeed user & then specify how much you like or hate what type of entries they submit.

After doing that you’re ready to get started. There’s a right sidebar that offers a few options for you such as viewing your friends’ posts, your own posts, your comments, your likes, your rooms & the public feed. There’s also a search box where you can search through entries.

NoiseRiver also has the “share something” box, just like on FriendFeed, that allows you to share a message and/or url on your feed or any of the rooms that you belong to. Also you can add an image or sound by adding a url for one or both as well.

When viewing the actual feed on NoiseRiver, it does resemble FriendFeed a lot but you will also notice a few things that are different. First you might notice the color coding; “when an entry is red it means that you’ll probably hate it, when it’s green, it means that you’ll probably like it.” Also, just like FriendFeed you can comment, like, reshare & hide posts. The best feature on NoiseRiver though, in my opinion, is the ability to “tag items with your feelings“.

There’s a heart that you can click on for each entry & when you do, you’ll see the box that appears above. As you can see there’s a box with suggested keywords which you can change or leave alone. The interesting thing about these keywords is that they’ll be added to your other list of keywords (yes the ones you setup in the beginning).

You then will need to add a “feeling” to the entry by picking something from the drop down you see above - which goes from love to hate. The thing about the “feeling” is that it will be attached to the keywords in the box, So, instead of using the slider (like above) you’re saying how much you like or dislike the entry in words. Of course you can always go back to your Interests list to change the keyword settings.

So, what I see here in NoiseRiver is a nice way to filter out the noise in your FriendFeed entries & also filter out users you don’t like as much as others. I definitely think that many users, including myself, could benefit from something like this.

One last thing I noticed was that when you hover your mouse over a users nickname, you get a nice little popup box about them. You can also specify there how you “feel” about their entries as well. You’ll also see a percentage that represents their social proximity - though I have no clue what this is or how it’s computed. Lastly, you can see also see all of their accounts & the rooms they’re a member of.

I’m wondering what you guys think about NoiseRiver. Have you ever used it or do you plan on using it? Do you think you might consider using it instead of FriendFeed? Please share.

Technorati Tags: noiseriver, friendfeed, friendfeed tools, noise filter, interests, keywords, neighborhood

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