How To Adjust Your Interests to Get Better Recommendations in Bottlenose

You may have noticed the Suggested for You stream in the Main folder, as well as the sort By Relevance option on streams (the little dropdown on the right corner of the middle column that lets you sort by time, popularity or relevance).

Both Suggested for You and the sort By Relevance features show you messages that Bottlenose thinks you might be interested in based on your interests. 

When you join Bottlenose, the app looks at your public Twitter messages to detect topics and people you might be interested in. 

These can be seen in Bottlenose by going to Settings (in the dropdown menu under your avatar on the top right), and then selecting the Interests tab.

On the Interests tab you can see Detected Interests, and you can also Add Interests. 

If you spend some time curating these (removing Detected Interests you don’t want, or that don’t belong) and adding ones that you do want, then Bottlenose will give you better recommendations in streams.

By the way, in an upcoming release we will be dramatically improving this area of functionality in a number of ways: It will analyze more than just your Twitter messages, and will update automatically over time as you use Bottlenose. In the meantime, if you do a little bit of curation of your interests you will get much better results.

Coming Soon: Scheduled Posts & Bit.ly

We’ve had a lot of requests for scheduled posting (via Buffer) and the ability to use Bit.ly as the URL shortener in messages. We will be adding these in the next release. We are also going to be refactoring authoring in general.

Now that we have the consumption experience to a pretty high level, we’re going to make the publishing experience equally #awesome. Share your wish-lists with us in our Feedback forum (via Help at the top nav).

Yes - Desktop App + Mobile Versions Are Planned

Hello #awesome Beta testers!

Many of you have asked for an iPhone and iPad version. Others would like Android. 

And yes, we do plan to release versions for iPhone and iPad, and then Android. 

Oh and yes, we will have a cross-platform desktop version of Bottlenose soon too. Stay tuned!

Coming Soon: Better Facebook Features

Currently in Bottlenose, you can connect your Facebook account(s), and then you can track your messages and notifications.

Using the Add Streams button, you can also add streams for groups and pages from your Facebook account(s).

You can also post to your Facebook accounts.

However, we don’t yet support posting to specific groups and pages yet, or for sending private messages in Facebook. We are working on these additional features and plan to release them in the near future.

What about Google+, Tumblr, and other Networks?

Yes! We want to add those and are planning to add many others as well.

Tumblr is easy. Google+ however does not yet provide a full API, so we can’t add it yet.

There are many other social networks we plan to add in the future. For example, Google+, once they have a full API, and networks like Quora, FourSquare, YouTube, Flickr, etc.

Not just social networks, but APIs from other apps too — for example, imagine GitHub, Salesforce, Uservoice, and many other apps that produce streams of notifications and messages.

Why not even email? Yes, we’re thinking about that too.

You should be able add every kind of stream in your life to Bottlenose someday. That’s our vision and the underlying platform we’ve built is designed to make that possible.

We call it “The StreamOS” - it’s a high-level pure Javascript and HTML5 operating system for apps that consume realtime streams. We’ll be sharing more about what this engine does in the near future…

How to Add Google Reader Streams

First, connect your Google Reader account by using the dropdown menu under your avatar (top right, navbar), and selecting Settings. Then go to the Linked Accounts tab.

Once you link Google Reader to your Bottlenose account, Bottlenose does NOT automatically make a folder for it, in the folders column on the left.

(We’re considering adding a folder for Google Reader, but we think people might prefer to just have their Google Reader feeds show up in the “Tracked” folder with their other feeds, instead. But we’re open to feedback on this.)

For now you can manually add Google Reader feeds from your Google Reader account, and they will show up in your Tracked folder. It’s very easy:

Just click the Add Streams button on the bottom left, and then click the Google Reader button in the pop-up window. Then you can add in any/all of your Google Reader streams.

Keep in mind that Bottlenose currently stores 4500 messages for free (in your browser’s local storage, not on the server). So every stream you add uses up some of those message storage slots. That’s still room for a lot of streams, but that’s why we don’t just add every RSS feed in your Google Reader account automatically - because it you’re like us you probably have a lot of RSS feeds you don’t really care about much. By selecting the feeds you really want you can optimize your use of Bottlenose’s free storage. 

Note: In the future we do plan to have an option Pro version of Bottlenose that will provide vastly more storage.

Advanced Search Tip: Using AND and OR in Searches

For example, “bottlenose AND sonar” would find messages that contain both “bottlenose” and “sonar.”

You can save these searches.

You can also add these simple AND/OR Boolean operators to searches you create using rules for custom streams.

This little trick makes it possible to make much more powerful searches and rules. 

Track Multiple Twitter and Facebook Accounts in Bottlenose

The new version of Bottlenose lets you link multiple accounts so you can track them all in one place. You can add multiple accounts per network too. So if you manage several Twitter accounts and/or several Facebook accounts, you can bring them all together in one place - and then apply the power of Bottlenose to them.

1. Just go to the dropdown menu and select Settings
2. Go to the Linked Accounts tab, and start adding accounts. 
3. Note that for multiple accounts, you need to login to Twitter and Facebook each time with the right credentials for each account. 
4. Each account gets its own folder in Bottlenose, and then you can add in more streams.
5. For example, using Add Streams, you can add in streams from your Twitter account (like your lists or saved searches) or from your Facebook account (like your groups and Pages).

For more detailed instructions, see the Bottlenose Tutorial.

Now You Can Track RSS Feeds + Google Reader in Bottlenose

Did you know that the new Beta 3 version of Bottlenose lets you keep up with RSS feeds too?

Yes! Our mission to eliminate “app juggling” continues. Instead of needing one app for your social media streams, and another app for keeping up with RSS feeds, you can now keep up with all of them in one place.

RSS is still one of the best ways to keep up with specific sites and news sources, as well as all kinds of notifications streams from apps.

Keeping up with RSS in Bottlenose is a much more versatile experience than Google Reader or any other RSS reader. For one thing you can use Sonar, and powerful filtering.

- You can add RSS feeds individually, via the Add Stream button.

- You can also connect your Google Reader account to Bottlenose to pull in all your feeds from there as well (after adding the account, use the Add Stream button to add streams for the feeds you want).

Enjoy!