Do you want to safely browse your Twitter stream and follow a good mix of people without running into the occasional swear word that would make razor-tongued Dave McClure blush? A microapplication built on the Kynetx platform removes all foul language viewed on Twitter.com and replaces it with something much more wholesome. The result is a cleaner stream that drops from a potential R-rating to a more serene PG environment.
The app, simply titled "Bleep Tweets" is authored by Michael Grace (@MikeGrace), who is behind many small Kynetx apps that add value to the sites you already visit, including the very similar app "Foul Facebook Filter" which removes swear words from that network as well. Other cool Kynetx apps include Hoverme, which provides details on Twitter connections from around the Web and TomatoFlix, which adds Rotten Tomatoes ratings to Netflix, IMDB, Redbox, Fandango and more. All of these apps leverage the Kynetx platform, which they call the live Web, with the Web browser as the playground.


With Bleep Tweets running. the app can replace naughty language with asterisks, the word "beep", can hide the status update outright or substitute pirate speak. It's quite silly, but with it always running, you're unlikely to hurt your sensitive eyes. For my running counter, since installation, it lets me know the app has checked more than 381,000 tweets and eliminated 7,150+ curses. That's just under 2 incidents for every 100 tweets. Follow somebody like Dave McClure (@davemcclure) or Alex Wilhelm (@alex) and you're sure to get your numbers a tad higher.


Bleep Tweets now makes it safe to watch your friends' streams during major sporting events again, or in the often inebriated weekend evenings. And it's totally simple to run. Make sure your browser is Kynetx enabled and then add the app. You'll bleeping love it.

After a semi-private 10 week incubation period kicked off in mid-February, XYDO is ready to bring its social network to the public. Focused on news to bring socially-endorsed content from your streams to you, finding the best content powered by your connections, XYDO wades into a crowded field of news consumption apps - many of whom have opted to focus on mobile or iPad instead of the Web, where they argue the majority of people still go for news.

In a detailed brief released alongside their unveiling at midnight Eastern time tonight, XYDO says, "iPad reader apps, while theyʼve gotten a lot of attention, represent a tiny fraction of how online news is consumed," taking aim at products including Flipboard, News.me, Pulse and Zite, most of whom have made the iPad their launchpad. XYDO also highlights the availability of their content by dedicated social streams, such as those on Twitter which lead with an "x_", such as "@x_startups".

In February, when first encountering XYDO, I highlighted its similarities to the much discussed Quora. It seems this has resonated, as the company's founders see it as Quora mixed with Digg. You get the ability to engage with shared content on the site, but the numbers continue to drive the highlighted content, with shares on social sites pushing numbers ever higher, which they call "social endorsement", as opposed to "non-prioritized, purely reverse chronological order", common from streams like Twitter and Flipboard.

Like the vast majority of sites that talk the personalization game, XYDO appears to be leaning heavily on social collaborative filtering to divine the top news for you, tapping your social connections to surface interesting content, and organize it by topic. You can then filter the content based on your interests.

Its debatable whether this social news network can surface interesting conversations on the shared content, as Quora has, but it does serve as a curated alternative to the single sourced Paper.li and other personalized newspapers that grew like mushrooms last year. If you didn't get into Xydo a few months ago, you no longer need an invitation, so go to it. You can find me at http://www.xydo.com/users/978/submissions.

Disclosures: my6sense, where I am vice president of marketing, presents personalized streams on mobile devices and offers an API for users. Theoretically, this means we compete or could partner with some elements of Xydo, Flipboard, Pulse and News.me.

I've long extolled the virtues of OneTrueFan, the logical successor to the soon-to-be deceased MyBlogLog, spawned by the latter's founders, racking up one's visits around the Web, duking out top positions like Foursquare mayorships. I eagerly added code to my blog as one of the few active widgets I run to get a better sense of the frequent visitors and encourage community. Meanwhile, as I experiment, the network is growing up a bit and making changes. You can see one of those changes with the house ads running on my site, which you can trust I get no pennies for, and a refocus that takes the activity within the OneTrueFan network and makes it live completely within the bottom bar - an extension to most popular browsers, instead of on the company's Web site.

Unsurprisingly, initial feedback on OneTrueFan made the casual comparisons to Foursquare, along with some questions around security - where one had to trade off a third party watching what sites you visit and how frequently for a few badges and informal competitions with friends and strangers. I enjoy seeing people post they've taken the OneTrueFan badge of one Web site or another to Twitter, and the occasional emails I receive saying someone or another has kicked me off the top spot of one of my former top hangouts. But OneTrueFan isn't toying with being a silly gimmick for a sliver of early adopter Web centrists. It's very possibly creating a horizontal social network across the Web for disparate sites to understand their loyal visitors, and for those visitors to learn what stories people like them find intriguing through share history.


As you can see from the browser bar below, or if you have the extension installed yourself (and I wish you would), OneTrueFan has provided more transparency in how the service assigns points. The site speaks to wanting to encourage sharing of good content to other social networks, and that absolutely comes into play - meaning a popular Twitter or Facebook user who gets a lot of clicks can pass by a regular, but more reserved, visitor who regularly stops by each day.


OneTrueFan spells out the point system as follows:

• Daily Site Visits are 10 points apiece, per domain or subdomain
• Each page view adds 1 point.
• Each page share adds 5 points per network.
• Each clickthrough on a share gets 1 more point.

Simply stated, if I visit a Web site today, share a story and get 10 click throughs, I could get a possible 25 points, good enough to start creeping up the leaderboard. For small sites that don't get much traffic from early adopters, this could be a top position, but for more addicting and popular networks, it could take hundreds to appear in the top visitors chart. For example, one needs 221 points to be atop ESPN.com, and 260 to lead CNN, but the top LinkedIn score has tallied more than 1,100. Good luck being top dog there.


I spoke with company cofounder Eric Marcoullier last week about the move to push more content into the bar and away from the destination site, and he said it was a move to encourage publishers to implement the bar themselves, as I have. Rather than push users to their site, the activity remains on the active domain. As the world knows, we have more than enough destination sites masquerading as niche social networks, and OneTrueFan (or OTF as we often call it), is trying to do something different, which brings value to bloggers, publishers and the occasional visitors alike.


Winning the OTF badge from a site doesn't yet create the prestige that racking up badges and mayorships does on everyone's favorite location based services, but it could, especially as more people get comfortable with sharing their browsing behavior. After all, you can easily tell the bar to stop tracking your visits to specific domains, and all known adult sites are automatically hidden. I've taken to putting the OTF bar on all browsers I use on all machines, and it's one of the few extensions I've embraced. In a world where a lot of activity can be siloed, or where we rely on teh sharing buttons that come from the publisher to get the best content downstream, it's nice to take the OTF with me and get credit for sharing the best stuff to my networks. You can get your bar at http://www.onetruefan.com.

On September 11, 2001, I learned of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York by browsing an online finance bulletin board, and turned on CNBC to catch the news as it developed. I spent the day hearing updates on the radio and refreshing the Internet sites that were keeping us updated under heavy load. Tonight's news of Osama Bin Laden's killing came in a new environment, one that works not just faster in its ability to broadcast, but in its reliance on individuals and social connections to break the news.

Tonight, I learned of the news via a Google Talk notification from a friend who served in Special Forces in Afghanistan. I then turned to Twitter to catch the world's instant reaction as they took in the quick updates. Babysitting the kids, I couldn't catch Obama live, but saw his address to the nation via YouTube as it was shared on one of the many social networks I visit regularly. My Facebook news feed was filled with excited updates from friends of all backgrounds, cheering what was very bad news for a small handful of people but great symbolic news for millions.

As with many other acts of history of late, from the Iranian protests in 2009 to more recent uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, it's become cliche to highlight social media's involvement in the event or its spread. Make no mistake that social media had zero involvement in the killing of Bin Laden. Secret operations stay secret for a reason and are carried out by true professionals willing to risk everything. So you're not going to get yet another story like that from me. But the time lapsed between the event that put Bin Laden on the front page and tonight's announcement which concluded in his obituary saw dramatic changes in the way we discover and share data.

Keep in mind that in the fall of 2001:

• Google was a private company with Eric Schmidt 6 months into his position of CEO
  
• Internet Explorer 5.5 was the dominant Web browser.
  
• The iPod was launched in October, to mixed reviews.
  
• Blogger was two years old, and 18 months from its sale to Google.
  
• Friendster hadn't launched yet.
  
• LinkedIn didn't exist.
  
• Mark Zuckerberg was in high school.
  
• The combined AOL Time Warner was 8 months old.
  
• Twitter was two companies away for Ev Williams.

Ten years of progress has delivered us a new world of realtime, a new world of smartphones, a world of mobile applications, a world centered around texting and instant notifications, one where friends can share news from any source to practically any destination, a world where anybody has the chance to have a voice, which can be shared to millions in moments if the content hits the right spot.

As the rare Silicon Valley geek who sports less-techy liberal arts degrees, with mass communications and political science from Cal Berkeley, the intersection of media and politics is always interesting to see unfold, tonight and on any other big night. I loathe those who are going to turn this into their own theater and trade barbs over party affiliations or try to make this about something it's not. I loathe the silly jokes I am already seeing about GPS and location tracking. I hope we can recognize the night in its context and know there will be even more big nights in the many years to come and each of us will find out the news in our own ways - faster and more direct from the trusted sources we choose on platforms we have not yet even dreamed.