As social media becomes more prominent, it takes up an increasing amount of our time and attention. At the same time, the sheer number of social networks seems to be every expanding. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, and countless others all demand a piece of our attention. It can easily become too much, so that instead of feeling connected via these networks, we begin to feel overwhelmed by them. Bottlenose means to change all that. The web-based program bills itself as a social media dashboard, and aims to help users sort through all the information pouring through their social networks every day.

The social media client uses what it calls “stream intelligence” to bring all of a user’s social networks into one unified stream, which users can then sort and filter in very precise ways. The software also learns from users’ preferences and choices in order to bring them the things they are most interested in, and even point out things they might have missed. The client also uses what it calls “social assistance,” which employs a system of alerts and action-based rules to make sure that users are made aware of certain things, and even taking certain kinds of actions on their behalf.

The client is built around an intriguing graphic interface called Sonar, which groups trending topics and user interest together visually in clusters, which is intended to allow the user to easily explore information from their streams by topic.

The client is currently in private beta. Those who want in must have an invite code. Interestingly, they are also admitting Klout users with a score of at least 40 into the private beta without an invite code. In fact, screenshots on the Bottlenose’s press page suggest that the service is fairly tightly integrated with Klout.

Below is a video from the Bottlenose website that gives more information about the service.

What do you think of Bottlenose? Does it look like a major innovation, or just another Twitter client? Let us know in the comments.