Last week at the Silicon Halton Tech Meetup here in Oakville, we were introduced to some very interesting startups.

One was called Topicurious, a Twitter platform that is still in private beta, but that I think will help create a better Twitter experience for Twitter users.

I asked founder Craig DesBrisay to answer a few questions about Topicurious:

What is Topicurious?

Topicurious is an advanced Twitter search engine – think of it as Google search for Twitter (plus more).

With 500,000,000 tweets per day, Twitter is a goldmine of the latest and greatest information on any topic you can possibly imagine. However, it’s also a steady stream of selfies, breakfast updates, profanity, and a lot of otherwise useless information that people or brands want us to see.

Topicurious helps cut out fat.

It trims down all the unneeded noise to show us only what WE want to see.

What does it do?

Topicurious filters the noise and funnels content to you with relevant, real-time hashtag streams.

It finds current trending hashtags for your keywords (topics of interest) and makes it easier to find and consume the information you’re specifically interested in.

It also helps you discover the right Twitter users to target, follow, and engage.

Who is it for?

Topicurious is designed for the following types of users:

Twitter Users Who Want Improved Experience

Topicurious helps all Twitter users get more value out of their time on Twitter. By filtering the noise, it helps you spend less time reading tweets you’re not interested in and focusing your time discovering content and information you would otherwise never see. Twitter users of all experience levels benefit from the noise filtering capabilities of Topicurious.

Social/Community Managers Who Want More Engagement, Influence, and Reach

Topicurious helps social media marketers and community managers in several key areas: 1) discovering and sharing compelling content; 2) finding, connecting with, and engaging industry influencers; and 3) expanding one’s social reach by including more intelligent and relevant hashtags in one’s outbound tweets.

Social Salespeople Who Want More Leads and Prospects

Your prospective customers are on Twitter, but how do you find them?

By filtering the Twitter firehose down to very targeted and relevant tweet and hashtag streams, it’s easy to discover potential customers talking about issues related to your business.

With all the social media tools out there, why do I need it?

No other social media tool takes advantage of the power of hashtags.

There are in fact several “hashtag” monitoring and curation tools out there, but they depend on you to already know what the best hashtag is to monitor. The reality is that for any given topic there are literally dozens or even hundreds of relevant hashtags to follow and participate in, but no easy way to know the best ones to follow.

Based on the keywords you’re interested in, Topicurious finds you all the relevant and trending hashtag streams to follow, participate in, and leverage in order to expand your reach and accelerate the growth of your engaged following and community.

How much does it cost?

Topicurious is free and currently in Private Beta (sign up to request access here). The company is also working toward releasing a “Professional” edition that offers more advanced features and functions for Marketers such as advanced tweet filtering, sorting, and Twitter user analytics.

What new features will be available down the road?

Topicurious integrates with Twitter, but the future plan is to search and aggregate keyword-relevant content from multiple social networks simultaneously including: Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and others.

Some new features to expect from Topicurious down the road:

• automatic funneling of content from your Twitter “Lists” and your Home “Timeline” through the relevant hashtags that people are using (quiet the noise)
• search for people based on keywords that describe your “ideal customer profile”
• integration with Buffer and/or BundlePost for more advanced content curation
• integration with Klout, a potential measure of a person’s “influence” on various topics
• hashtag analytics (trending up/down, volume of tweets, reach/impressions, etc.)
• hashtag wiki (crowdsourced definition of the meaning of hashtags that people come across – similar strategy to Wikipedia; user-generated library of information)