The Ushahidi folks have released SwiftRiver alpha version 0.0.9 a.k.a Rhumba. We’ve written about SwiftRiver before covering how it was used by the Ushahidi team during the haiti earthquake to sift through tons of tweets.

This first alpha release is mainly for getting feedback for the development team.

Check it out:

An Introduction to the Swift River initiative from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

The Ushahidi blog tells the story behind Swift River in this blog post, from conception, through to the first beta and what the future holds for Swift. According to the post, we can anticipate a ‘beta’ release in August:

This morning’s release of SwiftRiver v0.0.9 Rumba is the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of planning and a few months of development time. When I came on board in December, the Ushahidi staff, Kaushal Jhalla, Chris Blow, Ed Bice and many others had already done fantastic jobs of making Swift known and prototyping their ideas. But they still needed an application, and to get it done (amidst all the other chaos like Haiti and launching the iHub) Ushahidi needed someone who could focus only on Swift for however long it took to get the job done. As a huge supporter of SwiftRiver for months prior, it was exciting to be asked to take on the task….

How do you deal with ‘too much information’? How do you filter it in a way that saves time, without sacrificing accuracy? This is the problem SwiftRiver is attempting to solve.