Have you ever thought that life would be eas­i­er if you could take a metaphor­i­cal sweep­ing brush to your feeds, remove the rub­bish and reveal the mean­ing­ful news? EverySig­nal makes that possible.

The end­less flow of data that pass­es through your social streams means that occa­sion­al­ly impor­tant nuggets of infor­ma­tion are swamped by the friv­o­lous and the triv­ial. Start-up EverySig­nal promis­es to help sort through the unim­por­tant and reveal the hid­den gems.

The sim­ple premise of the com­pa­ny demon­strates that there are still cute ideas to be had in the social media sphere and plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ty for those look­ing for social media jobs.

EverySig­nal also boasts a pedi­gree. Based in San­ta Mon­i­ca, the firm launched from the Sci­ence incu­ba­tor, which itself was found­ed in 2011 by for­mer MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Col­or co-founder Peter Pham.

EverySig­nal was start­ed by self-con­fessed non-Face­book addict Derek Mer­rill who didn’t have time for friend or fol­low­er cull, but want­ed to make sure he didn’t miss the vital infor­ma­tion in his feeds. He decid­ed to devise a way to help peo­ple sort through the 30 bil­lion pieces of con­tent shared on Face­book each month and find the infor­ma­tion that’s rel­e­vant to them.

Mer­rill explains: “I nev­er lived inside Face­book and because of that, I real­ly was miss­ing most of the things hap­pen­ing, or if I found out, I was the last per­son to know.

“From my point of view, this is bring­ing me back into [social media] in a nat­ur­al way. I don’t real­ly care about a pic­ture of someone’s bur­ri­to, but I do care when some­one starts a busi­ness, or when you go on an exot­ic vaca­tion, or when your dad is hospitalized.”

How Does it Work?

EverySig­nal, which launched just last week out of San­ta Mon­i­ca, works by aggre­gat­ing data and com­pil­ing those posts that con­tain key­words set by the user, or that fall into pre-set cat­e­gories such as birth­days, job changes, engage­ments and preg­nan­cies that are again cho­sen by the user. The ser­vice uses nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing to scan posts and con­ver­sa­tions for rel­e­vant top­ics and key­words and will squeeze all rel­e­vant updates into one neat, dai­ly email alert.

Users sim­ply link up their social media accounts and by using this tidy ser­vice means they’ll nev­er miss an anniver­sary, a birth­day, a pro­mo­tion or a house move again.

So What’s New?

Of course social media plat­forms have made their own attempts to cat­e­go­rize con­tent and cus­tomise noti­fi­ca­tions, albeit with lim­it­ed success.

LinkedIn noti­fies users when their con­nec­tions update their employ­ment sta­tus, while Face­book set­tings can be adjust­ed to alert users of birth­days and oth­er events, but where EverySig­nal is dif­fer­ent is the degree to which the noti­fi­ca­tions can be cus­tomized and the brevi­ty with which their delivered.

What’s more, the com­pa­ny have opt­ed to deliv­er their noti­fi­ca­tions in a way that feels cozy and famil­iar and doesn’t over­whelm users as this would defeat the object. Instead, sub­scribers to the free ser­vice are sent an email once a day, with all of their rel­e­vant noti­fi­ca­tions set out like a social media feed. The team worked hard to make sure the once-a-day alert was easy to use and felt comfortable.

“It’s a tough prob­lem,” Mer­rill said. “If you think about this from an engi­neer­ing per­spec­tive, every user’s inter­face is dif­fer­ent. That has been an enor­mous chal­lenge. … We decid­ed; let’s just play off nor­mal user famil­iar­i­ty. We’re try­ing our best to make things feel com­fort­able. We don’t want to copy the Face­book feed, but that’s what peo­ple feel famil­iar with.”

The gam­ble paid off and the com­pa­ny have record­ed 70% of all dai­ly digests as opened.

Can it Monetize?

With such a sim­ple idea, the future looks bright for EverySig­nal and it also involves mak­ing com­mer­cial use of the social data it han­dles, per­haps by mak­ing it avail­able to pow­er users, agen­cies, brands and busi­ness­es – all for a tidy sum, nat­u­ral­ly. As the com­pa­ny grows, so too will the oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple look­ing for jobs in the social media sec­tor.

Mer­rill con­tin­ued: “We have poten­tial to build a very large busi­ness by offer­ing a free prod­uct every­one can enjoy and then offer­ing pro­fes­sion­al fea­tures we can charge for … things like get­ting more real-time updates through a mobile appli­ca­tions or SMS alerts, or access to more infor­ma­tion with­in a network.”