The only sites that Keepstream doesn’t work in yet are WordPress.com and Posterous – they have to “white list” us, so you should nudge them and let them know they should allow our widget asap!

How to embed into self-hosted WordPress:

Step 1: Grab the embed code.

Step 2: Paste the embed code while on the HTML tab (HTML mode).

Step 3: Enjoy!

Step 1: Grab the embed code.

Step 2: Create a Video post.

Step 3: Paste the embed code.

Step 4: Enjoy!

With our embed widget, rather than disrupt your audience’s workflow, you can deliver content directly to them by integrating a social widget into your blog or website.

We’re excited to announce we’ve just launched a big refresh of that embed. It’s easier to read, it’s prettier, and it’s less invasive. To embed, grab the code from the right sidebar of a collection page. Or hit the Embed button, next to the Share Collection button.

We aren’t stopping here though. We have a lot of other plans to enhance the widget, such as customization and the ability to share.

Please let us know what you think the top priorities are for improvement from here – by commenting below or by posting at Get Satisfaction. Seriously, we really need your thoughts – please comment!

Here’s an example of what the new embed looks like.

Twitter Favorites Suck. Keepstream Can Help.

Favoriting is a ubiquitous Twitter feature that lets you flag a tweet as being something worth saving. But it’s just one raw chronological stream. That makes it almost impossible to find and share those awesome pieces of content that you saved a week ago – a month ago – a year ago.

What we need is a way to organize our favorites, the same way we organize our bookmarks when we save an interesting link. Delicious.com has been doing this forever with regular links, but it’s a social media world now – that’s where we find cool content, and that’s where we need to save it!

How to organize your Twitter favorites and retweets:

Not only does Keepstream let you organize and share your Twitter favorites, you can also organize retweets.  And if you want a more fully-featured way to create bundles of tweets, we also have a Create interface for the professional curator (video: Keepstream Tutorial on Vimeo).

Bottom Line? Favorite or retweet the best tweets. Then later, stop by Keepstream to organize them.

Consider the big picture – there are many other ways to flag content as important, such as voting something up on Quora or Reddit, digging something on Digg, liking something on Facebook, and more. That activity is curation happening all around us, but usually it’s hidden from our view. This is what we are working on at Keepstream – making the social web a more organized place, and helping us find the content that is truly important and personalized.

Keepstream Tutorial from Keepstream on Vimeo.

We are excited to launch a new, easier way to curate Twitter Favorites and Retweets.

Our new interface streamlines real-time curation by focusing on Twitter retweets and Twitter favorites. We present users these statuses in an easy-to-read list and provide a powerful dropdown menu to quickly send statuses to Keepstream collections.

The UI is designed to be quick.  Adding items to a collection feels just like applying labels in Gmail or adding users to a list in Twitter.  We want to empower Keepstream users to create many collections of their social media content, from personal conversations to important articles organized by topic.

Bottomline? If you want to curate that tweet, just favorite it or retweet it. Then later, come to Keepstream and quickly organize them into collections.

How to use the new interface

When you log in to Keepstream, visit your personal profile to see tabs for “Favorites” and “Retweets”. These pages display your Tweets with a button that shows a dropdown when pressed. The dropdown includes a list of your current collections. Start typing, and the list will automatically filter itself.

Have a Tweet that doesn’t fit an existing collection? Click “create new collection” to quickly make a collection.

"Organizer" Dropdown

Why are we experimenting with this new UI?

We wanted to build a way to curate that anyone can use – no matter how tech-savvy they are and no matter what Twitter client they are using. Every popular Twitter client supports favorites and native retweets – so that means they can all support curation! It’s curation for the masses.

We believe that the current interfaces and plugins for real-time curation products are very heavily focused on the power Twitter user. That is, these interfaces provide inputs from every Twitter feature imaginable, but can be unwieldy for the mainstream social media user.

This new feature aims to be “Curation 101″, based on actions you already do. Rather than change your workflow, just keep on favoriting and retweeting the best tweets. Keepstream will help you organize them.

Next steps

Keep checking on Keepstream as we continue to expand this new functionality and develop better ways to discover organized content. What do you think of the new feature? Please give us your feedback here or at our Get Satisfaction!

Facebook

Keepstream is meant to be a place where content comes from anywhere – as long as it’s the best content!  We’re one step closer to achieving that mission by integrating with our big friend: Facebook. Anytime you share a link or status on Facebook, you can access it from Keepstream!  Also, you can search the public Facebook timeline, so you can include buzz from both Twitter and Facebook into your collections!

Adding Facebook is all part of an updated look and feel for the Create interface.  There are separate easy-access tabs for your Keepstream bookmarks, Twitter content, and Facebook content.  Start by clicking the Facebook tab.

The first time you use Facebook, you need to Facebook Connect – so that we can access all the good stuff you are sharing! Click the “Connect to Facebook” link, which will direct you to the Settings screen. Click the Connect with Facebook button.

After connecting with Facebook, you should be brought back to the Create interface to finish building your collection!  Now you can remix links, tweets, AND Facebook.

Following

An important part of building a tightly-knit community is providing awesome ways to connect with other people.  Today we are releasing “Following”.  You can follow people, and you can follow collections.  It’s very simple at this point – establishing a connection for quick access.  From here we’ll be building awesome ways to find your friends and keep track of the things your friends are posting, stay tuned!

You can follow any person from their profile page.

To see who you are following and who follows you, go to your profile (or “my collections”).  Click the follower or following count to get more information on who those people are and to access their profiles.

You can follow any collection from the collection page.

Or you can quickly follow collections in the Browse Collections area, accessed from the navigation bar.

Access your “Followed Collections” from the Followed Collections area, accessed from the navigation bar.

As always, we crave your feedback!  Let us know at our support site http://getsatisfaction.com/keepstream or email me directly at tim (at) keepstream |dot| com.

Thanks and see you on Keepstream.com!

Captions

As a curator, you need the ability to offer your perspective on the content you share! With captions you can do just that – by adding your commentary below the tweet or link. To take advantage, create a new collection – or go into edit mode for an existing one. Now there’s a Caption Button right next to the X!

Insert your commentary, and hit “Add Caption”.

You can always go back and edit it later by clicking the caption button again.

Enjoy great looking commentary on both your site and Keepstream.com!

Sort

Many of you have asked us about sorting your collections by time, and we’re happy to make an elegant solution available to do this. To take advantage, create a new collection – or go into edit mode for an existing one.

By default, there is now an advanced options toolbar on the right. Here is where sorting and deleting the collection live!

Choose a sort option from the dropdown.

“Sort Manually” is the default. You have complete control over where each item goes by dragging and dropping.
“Newest to Top” will always place items with the newest time stamp on top. Are you doing live curation of an event or news topic? This is the option for you!
“Oldest to Top” is best for telling a story or painting a narrative. People will see the oldest content first on top, so they can follow the timeline from beginning to end.

Hit apply to see the changes.

Don’t worry if you screwed up! Hit undo to go back to the way it was.

Hope you enjoy these features as much as we do! If you have any feedback, you can reach us at http://getsatisfaction.com/keepstream

For those not familiar with Capital Factory, it is a business accelerator program in Austin, Texas. It’s very similar to other programs you might have heard of like TechStars and Y-Combinator. Five companies are chosen to come to the awesome city of Austin, Texas to receive guidance from 20 mentor-investors. The people that invest into the program are entrepreneurs and technology leaders that have done it before that can offer advice from experience. On top of that, you get access to a bunch of free services, free office space, and top-notch guest speakers. The program is an intense ten-week bootcamp, ending in a big finale called Demo Day – where you pitch your business idea to a crowded room of Austin’s best investors, entrepreneurs, and press.

Check out this video of us talking about the program:

It would have been so much more difficult to make it this far as a business without the help of the Capital Factory mentors. Not only did they give us expert advice and hold us accountable for progress, often you simply need that third-party group to consistently bounce your ideas off of. When you are caught in your own vacuum – it’s easy to forget to constantly talk with your users, re-evaluate what your strategy is, and rely on experimentation and data rather than just your hunches. For anyone with a really compelling idea, or existing small startups looking for a launching pad – Capital Factory can provide the catalyst you need for building a great business. Start putting together your All Star team of hackers and hustlers, refine your idea and prototype, and apply for Summer 2011.

Thank you mentors, guest speakers, Porter Novelli, Clutch Creative, Red Carpet Events, and so many others for an awesome Capital Factory experience. And a special thanks goes out to all the awesome friends we made in the Austin community that opened their arms to us and became not just beta testers… but evangelists for our cause! We couldn’t be here without you.

Here’s a collection of Keepstream Twitter chatter from the Demo Day event: