Maximize Your Time Online with SwiftRiver

Finding information on the Internet is not as easy as opening up Google and typing in what you want to find anymore. Well, maybe it still is; but, if you already have multiple sources for gathering online info, how do you organize and make sense of it all?

If you look at the end of any Internet article, the site will provide its readers with tons of ways to share information (Twitter, Facebook, email, Digg, Reddit, Buzz, etc.). Now imagine attempting to create profiles on all of those sites to gather all of that information in real-time.  It’s a daunting task for any social media expert, let alone someone who just wants to research information found online. It’s a task nonetheless that SwiftRiver wants to help you make a whole lot easier.

SwiftRiver’s goals are:

- To speed up the process of managing real-time data streams (email, web, sms, Twitter)
- To add elusive context (location, historical data) and history (reputation of sources) to online research
- To offer a dashboard for monitoring multiple channels of information at once
- To offer advanced aggregation and analytic tools on or offline
- To give the user control over advance curation tools and filter

In other words, SwiftRiver is not just another data migration/aggregation platform; it actually looks at the information, breaks it down, and organizes it according to customizable parameters you set. This will enable you to intelligently extract only the data/info you need.

The earthquake in Haiti earlier this year was a prime example of people taking to the Internet and social media networking to spread important information. The need to collect, filter and organize real-time online data to coordinate disaster relief efforts is one of the ways SwiftFly can be of value to organizations:

“In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds. This free tool is especially useful for organizations that need to sort their data by authority and accuracy, as opposed to popularity. These organizations include the media, emergency response groups, election monitors and more. This might include journalists and other media institutions, emergency response groups, election monitors and more.”

SwiftRiver Open Beta Announcement. from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

Since SwiftRiver is a free (you know a brotha loves free) open-source platform and not just “put all of your stuff here” site, it gives users the ability to add additional plug-ins and API’s to further customize and organize your experience, the end result is displayed on one dashboard to further increase your success in finding what you need while decreasing the time it takes to find it.

Currently, SwiftRiver is in beta , but word on the street is it will be available publicly sometime this fall. For more information, visit Swiftly.org or Ushahidi.com

About the Author
Terrance Gaines is a husband, father and self-proclaimed Technology Evangelist who shares tech news, reviews, tips and tricks on his blog BrothaTech.com as well as other sites and in print media. You can also find him talking "all things tech" on Twitter @BrothaTech.
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