Update: We have TouchStone Invites to give out for free. Click here for more details.

We have had the pleasure of getting an invite to test the Touchstone Beta this past week.

What is it?

For those who have not heard about it yet, Touchstone is a free desktop app that helps you track important changes in your favorite sites by displaying live alerts. Think of it like a highly filtered RSS Reader that is intelligent enough to pick out the articles you.

It looks at incoming information (like RSS, Atom Feeds, Emails and Gmail), runs them through a set of filters (as specified and administered by you) and outputs the results in a horizontally scrolling ticker on the top of your desktop. The alerts and notifications can be tailored to how important you feel it is. Optionally, it could intelligently scan your computer, learn and recommend keywords based on what you have done in the past.

It is an output adapter that “consumes only the amount of attention required for the relevancy of the alert - something they call The Policy of Diminishing Attention Consumption.

In essence, it gives you the alerts and news that you want without sifting through lists of RSS readers and email.

Click on thumbnails below for examples of screenshots.

Positives

A definite step up from the disappointing Alpha (nearly Beta) version I tested out months ago. Features were easy to use. Visually, it gives a sophisticated yet simple look.

Installing and loading it, automatically docks the ticker bar on the top of my desktop rather than it floating aimlessly. Each scrolling news alert is a clickable link that will open up your browser automatically to read the article.

My choice of about 15 different keywords related to technology, made it come back with about 4800 relevant matches from 5 default sites (to include Google News), automatically loading up the alerts in the ticker as headers of the articles. Adding several favorite sites were easy enough and integrated well with the other alerts.

The mouseover effect when you hover on an alert is an excellent idea, stopping the ticker and displaying a summarized version of the article with options to delete the article from the ticker or drag it out as a “post-it” type note on your desktop.

It wasn’t a resource hog, looking at my CPU/ memory usages on my computer while testing it, it took about 50,000K. Not bad comparing it to about 400,000K of what my Firefox 2 browser was using. Running Touchstone close to a week, I haven’t had any problems on my XP system i.e. no application crashes, faults, errors that caused it to shut down prematurely while multitasking - so it seems pretty stable on my end.

Negatives

Usability may be an area where they need to improve upon… there are just one too many steps needed to see, add to and change a feature. Maybe a tabbed menu option would be a better alternative instead of having the user open 2 separate windows for choosing his keywords and further refining his choices.

There wasn’t any feature to specify how old/ new the news alert was. I believe users would welcome the additional feature of allowing them to specify how far back the news and alerts are i.e. getting alerts within a specific time length. My keyword search for “tech” resulted in outdated articles that went as far back as 25 days. I would have liked a way to limit my search to news alerts within the last couple of days or so.

Besides the FAQ, usability instructions and a help area is limited. An improved help and instructional area could help the user to understand what each function is/ and does, assist in quick problem fixes and answers to straight forward questions.

Some of the alerts weren’t properly synching up with the time it was actually published. I noticed that a handful of articles on the TouchStone ticker had said it was published within the last 24 hrs but in actuality it was an older article.

Suggestions and Improvements

Overall Opinion

While it may not benefit the casual blog/ site reader as much, this is an invaluable tool that simplifies the process of research for academics and professionals alike. It is not meant to replace the RSS Reader in anyway, but it does improve workflow/ productivity by acting as an intelligent personalized “tipster” right on your desktop and one that gives you up to date persistent information. Being a heavy RSS user, I found it filtered a good amount of news based on my keywords and preferences. Touchstone is a powerful app that is going to be a permanent addition to my desktop tools and daily research setup.

Company Background

Touchstone is owned and operated by Faraday Media. Faraday was founded by 2 ‘Twenty Something’ Australian Entrepreneurs.

Faraday Media focuses on helping users deal with information overload by creating tools that generate a highly personalized view of worldwide information and entertainment media.

The company has been in operation since July 2006 (product development started earlier in January 2006). In that time it has launched an Alpha version of Touchstone to over 2000 self-subscribed testers, secured Angel Funding and attracted attention from global media and financial services brands as well as high-profile technology leaders.

Update: Touchstone is now Particls