While studying social media and online communities as part of the Interactive Journalism course, we have been encourage to explore new tools and experiment with using them ourselves.

Here are three tools you may not have tried yet, with some thoughts on their pros and cons:

Prismatic

Pros

• Prismatic curates a feed of stories based on your interests so you only see what is likely to grab your attention e.g. journalism, music, social media. 
• The tool learns about you from your other social media accounts, so long as you link them up, making it more effective at offering a wider image of your interests.
• This is a smart personal newsfeed that will draw users in with the relevant articles appearing for them. For those who follow a lot of people it provides a helpful way to cut out tweets unlikely to interest you.
• You can search keywords, topics, publications and people to add to your interests feed (and check them out first), save items to read later, or recommend them to others.

Cons

• It can look a little intimidating to use at first but after some exploration it becomes much clearer and simpler- a great tool!

Favstar

Pros

• Helps you find the best tweets from across Twitter (the most retweeted, most favourited), from both your favourite users and your own feed.
• This is a great tool for researching people before following them as you can view their most popular tweets of all-time and not simply their most recent ones- this gives you a sense of the topics they tweet about and what fields they are influential in, if any.

Cons

• You can favourite tweets using Favstar and curate lists of your favourite tweeters, but this seems a little pointless as it can be done on Twitter itself.
• Only really useful if you want to curate the people you follow according to their most popular tweets.

Overblog

Pros

• This 'one stop destination page for your best content' pulls together feeds from your various social platforms into one page which you can edit as you wish e.g. in a timeline format. The good news is that is automatically updates whenever you share a piece of content online.
• Coming soon is a  streaming option for broadcasting through your page in real-time from a mobile device.
• An analytics section tracks unique visitors, page views, referrers etc., helping to present an overall picture of your social media presence and influence so you can work out which platforms to use for which content.
• You can set up a multi-user page to access several contributor's feeds- useful for group projects- and post anything from text and images to links and audio.

Cons

• There is a danger of the page looking messy and overwhelming if many feeds are synced to it, but the analytics page seems useful.
• It may take a while to set up properly but there is good potential here as a quick and easy way to access many feeds at once. Whether many people will actually become regular users is another thing...