Prismatic: A Great Social Media and Discovery Tool (and My New Addiction)

I spend a heckuva lot of time everyday searching for and reading the latest news and opinions on project management, content marketing, the economy, higher education and several other topics that are near and dear to my heart. While I love the actual "reading" and "discussion" parts of my day, the "searching" part can be enormously frustrating. Sure, I get a lot of great recommendations from people on Twitter and Google+, and Alltop is an awesome tool that helps me manage feeds from my favorite publishers, but I also like finding new authors and sites.

Of course, I'm greedy enough to want to be able to do all of those things with one tool. When hearing about some new social media or media discovery tool, I used to rush to check it out. Unfortunately, most of the time I was disappointed -- not because the new apps were bad, but because generally, they performed the same functions as the ones I was already using. So, when I first received an invitation to try Prismatic a while back, I simply filed it and figured I'd take a look when and if I had time.

About a week or so ago, I heard some others praising Prismatic and remembered the invitation so I decided to go ahead and take a look for myself. And, WOW, I sure do wish I had checked it out sooner. It's really both a social media and a media discovery tool. It links up to your Twitter account and uses info from there to help give initial recommendations for topics and publishers you might like, but it also has a global search tool so you can dig down into any topic you want. I'm including a screenshot below so you can get an idea of what the interface looks like.

Prismatic also lets you save topics and specific publishers to your Interests list, favorite stories so you read them later, see recent tweets that have been made about each story, tweet the article yourself, find related stories -- well, in short, it does almost everything I want to do. I still use HootSuite to help me schedule certain items and track results, but I've replaced almost all of the other apps I was using in the past with Prismatic. If you haven't tried it out for yourself yet, I highly recommend it -- and, let us know what you think!