Furthere - the Twitter Powered Blog

I happened to notice an article about this new site Furthere on my RSS feed this morning and decided to check it out. Furthere aggregates your tweets into a live-updating blog, which at first seems entirely useless to me. After checking it out, it has a few cool features which have the potential to really make it something new if the owners play their cards right. Here is my review:


First, I don't think the Furthere home page sets up the experience in a way that really lets me know what its about. Reading the information provided leaves me feeling like the blog is just going to be my tweets lined up, with nothing special going on. The features are not really elaborated on; if my curiosity / boredom hadn't gotten the best of me I probably would never have tried the service out.


After setting up my account, this is what my 'blog' looks like: 

It looks like my Twitter feed, but with only my tweets... pretty boring huh? So, what now?


It turns out there is a little button under each tweet that says 'Enrich Tweet' that allows you to expound on what you've written. It even lets you write more than 140 characters! I enrich my 'Trying out http://furthere.com/ to see whats up with it #sm' tweet and it gives me a few options: Title, Tags (it auto-includes your hash tags), and Blog Post. I put in my post (copied from Marketing By the Numbers) and get this:

The last set of nifty features comes from Furthere's ability to aggregate either only certain #hastags into the blog, and the ability to allow friends to contribute: 

I can see this last part being used pretty handily; I may care what my Twitter friends and followers have to say about social media or web analytics, but have no interest in what they are doing for lunch... Furthere would allow me to pull this all together and end up with a pretty great reference resource we can all collaborate on without sharing information on what my roommate did to my glasses last night.

All in all, Furthere could turn into a pretty great tool both for those who don't have a blog (it really does make setting one up rather easy) and for those who want to collaborate with others. The blogging feature really is great, especially when 140 characters is not enough.

Note: when you invite people to your blog Furtherebot sends out '@Name, @PeterBretton invited you to join the weblog at http://peterbretton.furthere.com' to each person which is wicked annoying.

Who is Peter Rabbit, er Bretton?

I am. A Maine-grown man who attends Emmanuel College, I am a senior Business Management major with a minor in Mathematics. I have worked in marketing for about one year, with Harvard School of Public Health Center for Continuing Professional Education (CCPE) since January '09, and with 451 Marketing since January 2010.

My experience at CCPE has given me exposure to online marketing in most forms including cost-per-click marketing through Google Adwords, Email creation, list segmenting and optimizing, copy writing and research for listservs, and website creation. We recently released a social media campaign which I designed and lead which includes Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

My offline marketing experience has been almost entirely with copy editing.

The greatest part of my time has gone to tracking and analyzing marketing initiatives including media channel effectiveness, email content and subject line effectiveness, program rating, and website traffic. Although I have not yet worked with search engine optimization, SEO is an interest of mine that I should have exposure to within the next six months.

So, why did I start this blog? This will serve partly as my online portfolio, showing my copy writing skills, and hosting information I find which I feel is relevant to the marketing community. Simple enough, right?