Discover and Share Your Favorite Internet Tools with Curated.by

Curated.by has quickly become a new addiction for me (as if I needed another). In just the short amount of time that I've been a member of the site, I have discovered many useful Internet and social media tools and apps. The idea behind Curated.by is to make it easier to find "the good stuff" on Twitter. The goal of the site is "to help where a Twitter list or hashtag search is just not good enough."

As a member and curator of the site, your job is to put website links together in what they call bundles; these topic specific bundles are then shared on the site and followed by other users who choose to subscribe. "Curated.by works a bit like labels for Gmail. [They] let you organize your tweets around a topic, an event or a company." Bundles can also be embedded as a customizable widget on websites that allow JavaScript or shared via URL, Twitter and Facebook. If you prefer, your bundle can also be private.

You can create bundles using their bookmarklet or Chrome extension. The extension places a "curate" button on below every tweet on the Twitter website. This allows you to easy add tweets to a specific bundle, while the bookmarklet allows you to add any website link (discovered while browsing) to a bundle.

The home page is where your news feed appears. Here you can see updates from the people you follow on the site. When you join Curated.by (via Twitter OAuth) it automatically follows all of your Twitter friends that are already on the site. Curated.by is great for finding new friends as well, since you can connect with others that share your topic and bundle interests via the search bar.

The Explore page is where you can see the latest bundles and curators. The topics page is pretty interesting because you can see what other people have curated. Topics are in a list according to popularity.

When you view a bundle, you can see the curator, stats, links featured in it and followers. The news feed of the bundle is much like Facebook in that you can comment and like each item. Some items show links, others show text and some even have thumbnails. There are many possibilities and great uses for a tool like Curated.by. Best of all, what you include in your bundle and how you organize it is all up to you.

You can also receive email alerts and control what you receive alerts about. You can choose receive a notification when someone starts following you and when someone subscribes to your bundle. There is also an option to receive an email each time someone updates a bundle that you're following; you can choose to receive emails right away or as a once per day daily update.

What are your thoughts on Curated.by. Is it something that you see yourself using in a regular basis?

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