Got information overload? Get filtrbox, but don’t pay quite yet

Editor’s note: Filling in today for LTW Editor Rick Smith is Dan Kaplan of VentureBeat.

SILICON VALLEY - With a few maniac exceptions, those of us that consume, process and produce information for a living are on the brink of having our heads explode: We clean our email inboxes only to find that we’re behind on 150 RSS feeds. We dig into those feeds and then: Text messages! Twitter alerts! A new comment on FriendFeed! As it all happens, we can’t shake the feeling that somewhere, a critical piece of information is slipping by and giving our competitors an edge.

While some revel in the noise, bathing in it like pigs in the mud, the rest are desperate for help. In comes filtrbox, which just launched for the public, hoping to save the day. Best described as Google Alerts on performance enhancing drugs, filtrbox lets you select keywords to find relevant articles and blogs as they appear across the web and then makes it a cinch to filter out the excess. In some ways, it’s a filter for information junkies. In others, it’s a tool to get business intelligence about you and your brand. It competes directly with Trackus and, to a lesser extent, more sophisticated tools from Buzzlogic and Radian6. The latter two target social media analysts, provide a ton of features, and come at a much higher price. Filtrbox and Trackus are stripped down and priced for the everyday knowledge worker. Trackus also positions itself as an “online reputation monitor,” and doesn’t have the filtering capabilities of its competitor.

What makes filtrbox superior to Google Alerts is its ability to find content where Google would not and filter and analyze what it finds. The product pulls results from indexing services, RSS feeds and even Twitter and FriendFeed, giving each source a reliability score. You can filter for only the most reputable content, sorting between mainstream media and blogs. You can also run analytics on each keyword, so, for example, if a competitor releases a new product and picks up a lot of press, you can see the spike, scan the coverage, and be more informed when you decide how to respond.

What makes it inferior to Google Alerts is its price. While you can monitor the first five keywords for free, it’s $20 per month to get 25 keywords and $100 to scan 100. The free plan only stores results for 15 days, the $20 plan holds them for 45 and $100 gets you an entire year. For this VentureBeat blogger, whose interests span from the consumer Internet to cybernetics and AI, this service could be tremendously useful for staying up to date without causing my brain to call it quits. But for me and my peers, saving cash for a new iPhone, $20 per month is steep enough to keep us at bay. The fact that there is a short expiration date on the data storage also reduces its value and seems especially lame, considering how cheap storage has become. We might as well stick will Google Alerts and tolerate the noise or, even better, use a Yahoo Pipe to track keywords across the social web and create a supercharged feed.

Filtrbox also doesn’t feel far along enough to justify its cost. The interface looks simple but is not always intuitive and has some annoying flaws. You can’t, for example read the articles without clicking through to the page. The number of sources available, at over 1,000, seems somewhat limited, and while you can add any RSS feed you want, you currently have to do so one by one. To top it off, there is no refresh function to pull in the latest info at your command. Instead, you have to wait for the system to refresh itself, which only happens every few hours — hardly excellent when every minute counts.

Filtrbox says that it will address these concerns in a later release, and indicates that a desktop version, built using Adobe AIR, is in the plans. But to justify a full public launch and subscription fee, the product should have come with these features already in place.

That being said, if it does successfully tune its interface, archive the data, and release a great desktop app, it would be a boon to those who want to get some semblance of control of the information overtaking our lives.