The new beta design of Friendfeed adds some really nice advanced filters. I’m really excited about the addition of ‘popularity filters’ as I call them. They allow you to search for conversations or posts, that have received x number of likes or comments.

Just imagine how you can put this to use in your own field. You can search everybody’s posts (or just your friends’) for keywords, and filter them in terms of popularity. You have a unique ability to catch content way before it makes it to the mainstream online media.

Full res. on flickr.

You can have multiple tabs open with several advanced searches going on. This seems like an improvement over something like Twitterfall, which is browser based, and doesn’t have the same advanced search functions.

Here are Yahoo’s goals for the app:

• Create a desktop application that allows for the creation, grouping, and auto-execution of advanced search queries against Twitter
• Leverage existing skill-sets and tools
• Target the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems and minimize the amount of platform specific code that must be written
• Open source the code so that others can learn from, contribute to, and/or extend the product as they see fit

But to be fair, it does also seem like the ONLY advantage is the advanced search. Sideline offers very little in terms of interaction, you can’t reply or DM anyone, you can’t even log in. You can mark tweets as favourites, but as you are not logged in, these will only be saved locally and won’t be viewable in your Twitter favourites.

Except for being a desktop client and featuring tabs, it doesn’t offer much more than the official twitter search. It only updates every minute, you can set this to be less frequent. But you can’t have it update every two seconds or so, meaning if you monitor popular search terms, you will be bombareded with 100’s of results to go through every minute.

Hopefully Yahoo will improve this Twitter client in the future to include some of the features that you have in TweetDeck and Twitterfall, but at the moment it doesn’t seem very usefull. I will stick to Twiterfall for my Twitter searches. But as mentioned on mashable:

Sideline seems to be more of a research project for Yahoo rather than building a new major new product or division.

There hasn’t been many reactions as of yet in the blogosphere, but there has been a few on Twitter:

mahadewa@avianto That’s cool :) re:sideline 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to avianto

alicam: Not sure if we need another Twitter search app but it works nicely – http://sideline.yahoo.com/ 2 minutes ago from TweetDeck

frumpa: trying out Yahoo’s Sideline but the links are NOT active hyperlinks http://sideline.yahoo.com 38 minutes ago from TweetDeck

e_D_D_y: Is Yahoo! SideLine an April Fools joke ? Can’t get any result, it’s just… empty :( about 1 hour ago from DestroyTwitter

Facebook now sends out your status updates directly to your fans news feed, exactly like Twitter. Users can even respond to your status updates from their own news feed, no need to go to the fan page any more.

All this crap you have been told about conversation, having a person behind the brand etc. – It is all a load of old rubbish. They’re just sorry for themselves, licking their wounds after having spent years of building up thousands of followers. You were the smart one; waited for Facebook to sort out your worries.

But they still say that I’m not ‘listening’

They’re just saying that to feel better, if you want to listen just look at the responses you get to your status updates. Users can now respond to them from their own news feed. You are just like one of their friends; they trust you.

Not even Facebook bothers about using Twitter in a serious way. Besides, look at this wine guy, Gary, one of the most popular Twitter’s. Just look how he’s using Facebook, exactly the same:

If that’s not enough, have a look at his latest video. Basically saying that Facebook is the ‘new thing’.

People will still bang on about minimalistic differences such as public versus personal conversation, listening to trends, monitoring your brand, expanding your network and all that nonsense. They will say stuff like; “You can’t monitor what your unhappy customers say” or that “You can’t see when people are talking about your brand away from your page”. Ignore it, why would you even want that? What the heck, point them to this post if you don’t want to bother with them.

I consider this a public service to all companies and businesses, who’s ever had to put up with the nonsense of social media experts and SxSW geeks. You can now finally forget about Twitter, period. Besides, we all know that Twitter is only about stalking celebrities anyway!

The Format:

Monday March 30th. around 2pm, 20+ online journalism students from Birmingham City University will use twitter to ask questions about twitter, signing their tweets ‘#twask‘. – We need people to help us answer their tweets; so if you are up for it, help us teach twitter by following the #twask hashtag Monday afternoon.

Background:

As some of you may know, I run BirminghamRecycled.co.uk and have a great team of online journalism students, mentored by Paul Bradshaw , to help me. We see twitter as one of the most important tools in our online journalism toolbox; both as a research tool, but mainly as a way of keeping in touch with our users. One of the primary objectives of the site is to interact and connect with the local community of bloggers and content producers.

The majority of students have had no prior experience with twitter and have now only been using it for a couple of weeks. Some are starting to find their feet and are now looking to build their twitter profile, expanding on what they have already learned. Others find it harder to get to grips with the social and conversational nature of twitter, and are a bit uncomfortable with the idea of ‘stalking’ strangers online.

We hope by arranging a session like this, we will demonstrate how useful twitter can be when multiple people are talking about the same thing. It will give the more adapt twitterers a chance to explore ideas around the use of hashtags , and introduce beginners to @replies and the social aspect of twitter in general. But most importantly it will be a, hopefully, fun exercise for everyone.