Bottlenose Is a Game Changer for Social Media Consumption [INVITES]

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Bottlenose fights social media overload with flexible, granular feed customization options.

You can, for instance, follow just slices of Twitter and Facebook feeds, getting someone's tech news while skipping their Foodspotting posts. It's also easy to sort by author influence, trending in your network, your interests (it learns these based on your activity) and pretty much any other criteria. You can set up as many feeds as you want.

Any of these feeds can be viewed as a visual node map for quick browsing and have automatic actions such as "reply" or "send alert" attached to it. For instance, you could set up a rule that "for messages by people I have mentioned more than five times, show a desktop notification."

Bottlenose's biggest innovation, co-founder Nova Spivack says, is a new language analysis technology that is written in javascript and designed specifically for the short-form communication on social media, including shortcuts such as hashtags and @ signs. It enables the platform to develop a semantic understanding of information before sorting it however you'd like, and it's turned heads from big companies. Earlier this year, Mashable reported that Twitter was interested in acquiring Bottlenose. Spivack says that the company has "turned down a big offer," but didn't confirm it came from Twitter.

Aside from this technology, there's something unusual about how Bottlenose is sorting streams. Mainly, that it plans to allow third party developers add more default options for doing so. Through what it calls "assistants," you can already add streams such as "suggested reposts" or "by influencers" or one of your own. When Bottlenose opens this "app store" to other developers, the library of instant feeds will grow.

"It's just like Apple made the iPhone," Spivack says, "but 99% of the functionality comes from Apple developers."

Bottlenose may have Apple's app store concept, but our one gripe with the product is that it doesn't take the Apple route with regard to the rest of its design. They've given us everything, and we're a bit overwhelmed.

The startup has the potential to avert what Spivack calls the Sharepocalypse. But in order to succeed, Bottlenose will need to convince users that its plethora of functionality is worth some initial learning investment.

1,000 Mashable readers can sign up for the Bottlenose beta using the code "mashable."