The power of Categorical.ly comes from its rules engine. The rules engine lets you access all the power and flexibility of the system.

Rules get their own screen. You access them by pressing the “Rules” button on the top toolbar.

There are two types of rules you can create.

A “Friend Tweet Rule” operates on the tweets your friends send (the main timeline that you see on your Twitter home page).

A “Search Term Rule” operates on Twitter search results.

Setting Up Friend Tweet Rules

There are several ways to categorize your Friend’s tweets.

In the example in the screenshot above, I am creating a rule called “News” and have chosen all the news agencies (mostly tech news) that I follow.

In addition to specifying individual friends, I could also choose to create a rule based on:

• Tweets that contain certain words.
• Tweets that are direct messages
• Tweets that mention your @username (from your friends)
• And, tweets from your friends who are near a certain location.

Setting Up Search Term Rules

The search term rules in Categorical.ly take all the power of Twitter’s “advanced search” functionality and marry it with the flexible actions you can take with out rules.

In the above rule configuration, I am creating a search for any tweet that mentions the word “job” within 25 miles of Atlanta, Georgia.

If I am not sure if a given search term has any results, I can click the “Execute this Twitter Search” link at the bottom of the screen to open up that search in Twitter and see if it comes back with any results.

Twitter searches are very powerful and can be used to bring all sorts of data into your Categorical.ly Twitter Client.

Taking Actions with Your Rules

Once we get the data, of course, we need to do something with it. The actions screen is the same whether it is for a Search Term Rule or a Friend’s Tweets Rule.

The actions screen is displayed when you hit “Next” while creating a rule. From this screen you see a list of all the actions you can take with the tweets that match what you set up on the first screen.

In the sample rule above, I chose to display my tweets in a pane called “Atlanta Jobs” inside the client screen.

I also chose to receive an email once a day that contains all the tweets from that day which match my search terms.

And, finally, I chose to display those tweets with a different background color so they would stand out more.

I could also have:

• Emailed each tweet individually to a specific address (good for rules that do not get a lot of traffic)
• Hidden the tweet completely so that it would not show up in the client at all (good for filtering out tweets that are not business related.)
• Automatically followed the person who sent the tweet if I was not already following them (more on the auto follow features in a future post.)
• And, finally, I could have stopped following a user if I no longer wanted to.

Rules Rule

Categorical.ly’s rules are what give this site most of its power. If there is something you would like to do with a rule that we currently do not, feel free to add it to our suggestions box.

Explore the power of rules and let us know how we are doing.

We aim to be, Categorical.ly, the Best Twitter Client Possible.

Categorical.ly targets the Twitter power users:  users who follow more than a couple hundred people on Twitter. These are often people who use Twitter for their business, for marketing, and for communicating with their clients.

We add dozens of unique features specifically tailored to this community.  Our Rules Engine allows us to apply a set of custom filters to every tweet that comes into our system.

From color coding tweets, to getting an email digest of them, to grouping them by person, by keyword, or location, we aim to allow you to slice and dice tweets as never before.

Additionally, Categorical.ly is completely web based. This means you don’t need to recreate your rules on every computer you have. If you want to check your work accounts from home, simply log in to the website and everything is just as you left it.

Starting Up

This is just the beginning. As Categorical.ly matures we will be adding many new features, including click tracking from shortened links, analytics of your followers, your tweets, and your friends, and a lot more.

May 2009 is our launch month. I’m not going to use any software clichés like “alpha” or “beta” or anything like that. (Google has completely ruined the concept of beta software). Instead, just be aware that this is very early in the life of Categorical.ly. There are yet Many Things to Do. No doubt far more than I am aware.

So when you find some things left for me to do, add them to our Uservoice page.

And since we are so young, anyone who signs up in the next couple weeks will get a 30 day trial period (instead of the normal 7 days.) After which, when you realize how much you love us, you can pay our crazy low monthly fee.

My name is Patrick Burrows. I made this.