Earlier this week, a tweet Jimmy Winter directed Nick Ashley’s way sparked my interest. “Now get me in on that crowdlens beta!” Jimmy wrote. I’m always on the lookout for beta invites or announcements in our region, so I contacted Nick for more information.

CrowdLens is in public beta, so anyone can login and give it a try. Here’s more from Nick:

CrowdLens is a web-based twitter client I created to help you stay on top of your twitter stream. Crowdlens provides many features to make twitter more usable, including:

Thanks to our sponsor

Become an SPN sponsor »
Meet our sponsors »

* Oldest Unread Tweet First: this allows you to read through a conversation as it actually happened. Often times tweets only make sense when in context of what was said previously. By reading a conversation from the beginning, you will always understand what is being said.

* Auto-Loading Tweets: There is no need to constantly refresh a page only to find there is nothing new to read. CrowdLens will automatically poll for new information every 60 seconds, and add new tweets to the page.

* Read Tracking: as tweets scroll off the top of the page, they are automatically marked as read. Now if you log in at a different computer, CrowdLens will let you pick up right where you left off. These previously read tweets will not show up, so you aren’t forced to read the same information again.

* Inline previews: CrowdLens will show thumbnail images of all twitpic and yfrog pictures. I will be adding previews of more resources in the future.

* Keyboard shortcuts: Use the J/K keys to easily move forward/backword through your twitter stream. See http://www.crowdlens.com/features/ for a full list of shortcuts.

I have created CrowdLens in my spare time over the last few months. Then in the last few weeks I rewrote the entire backend from PHP to Python, and am hosting the site on Google’s App Engine. This is my first application on both App Engine and Python, so I’m sure there are plenty of bugs to find. I also love feedback (both positive and negative) so if anyone has any suggestions, complaints, feature requests, or bug reports, please let me know either on twitter (@nickashley) or email me (nick@nickashley.org).