Last week I reviewed an application called “Tweet Library” which lets you archive and organize tweets in collections directly from your iPad. It’s a well-designed piece of software that’s surely the best (and only, I assume) way to “curate” content from Twitter on the tablet. Like I also wrote in my review, though, there’s this neat and invite-only online service that I’ve been using for quite some time now to aggregate great material from Twitter and give it proper context for future reference: Curated.by.
Curated.by is still in the closed beta stage, so I’m not going to spoil all the details here. If you happen to have an account, feel free to follow me as viticci. I just wanted to give you a brief insight into Curated.by, which - yes - is a great online platform that plugs into Twitter but also comes with a dedicated iPad web view. Of course the iPad webapp isn’t as polished and “native” as an App Store app would be, but I’m not afraid to say it’s one of the best looking, most powerful webapps I’ve seen on the iPad so far.
The best thing about Curated.by is the possibility to curate tweets and create bundles (collections) from the Twitter website itself. Curated.by comes with its own “bundler” interface that allows you to check on your timeline, mentions, favorites and searches, but the real point of the service is enabling you to find and curate content directly from Twitter. Like I already said in my Tweet Library review, a digital curator should be able to organize content anytime, anywhere - and this is why I like where Curated is going: it comes with a webapp but you can install the browser extension to curate from Twitter.com, it’s got a dedicated iPad interface to make everything work smoothly with Apple’s touch interface, and I bet an iPhone version is on the way as well. What Curated.by does right (and where the competition is failing at) is the ubiquity factor of Twitter curation: Twitter is anywhere, a Twitter curation tool should do the same. Twitter is in iPad and iPhone apps, it’s in blog posts, it’s on the web - there are hundreds of services that fetch tweets and aggregate them to create personalized material. Curated.by aims at being your ubiquitous solution to find great tweets, group them, give them context and save them for future reference.
Curated.by isn’t perfect just yet, though, mostly because the platform is young and needs to evolve and learn how to scale before going mainstream. I’ve mentioned apps: Curated.by needs to figure out a way to let developers plug into the service just like many already do with “read later” services like Instapaper and Read It Later. Can you imagine the official Twitter iPhone and iPad app, or the multitude of unofficial clients out there, offering the possibility to send tweets to Curated.by without the need to open Twitter.com or Curated.by website? The next step for Twitter curation is integration, at a deeper level the one Curated.by is already exploring.
That said, I’m really enjoying the features Curated.by is currently offering and the iPad webapp is great. I’m looking forward to future implementations of the service in other apps, but as it stands right now Curated.by is my weapon of choice when it comes to Twitter curation on the web and iPad.
