Internet-based communication is changing so quickly these days that there seems to be an endless stream of beta releases. Yesterday, Simon wrote about some of the latest browser betas; let’s look at a few products and services for interacting with social networks, Twitter and instant messaging.
I don’t generally like living on the bleeding edge, but some betas are very usable, and I’ve already incorporated them into my daily workflow. Others look promising, but are not stable or are lacking too many features right now. But all of the following are worth trying, and watching as they develop. We’ll review them more thoroughly as they mature. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: adium, adobe air, beta, brizzly, Email, Facebook, facebook chat, file sharing, fluid, Google Reader, imo.im, myspace, seesmic, sms, socialite, tweetdeck, tweetminer, twitter, video, voxox
In an interesting follow-up to Dawn’s post earlier this week, “Is Twitter Replacing the RSS Reader?” — which generated some fairly heated discussion in the comments — Robert Scoble has posted “Why I don’t use Google Reader anymore” in which he describes why he no longer uses Google Reader, preferring instead to rely solely on Twitter (and its new Lists feature) to keep up to date. Scoble uses Twitter’s new Lists feature (which Darrell wrote about earlier this month) to organize his Twitter stream and keep it easily digestible.
Helpfully, Scoble has provided links to four of his Twitter Lists as examples:
Twitter has only just started to roll out the Lists feature (it’s not enabled on my account, for example) so you might not be able to access them yet.
Personally, I still think that RSS readers are useful, but I know that I don’t check mine as religiously as I used to (maybe just once per day in the morning), as I know that I’ll discover anything really important through Twitter. I don’t think I’m ready to drop Google Reader just yet, though.
How about you? Will Twitter Lists make you consider dumping your RSS reader?
One of the great features of social networking is how easy it is to share information with large groups of people. In this post, I’m going to share some ways that you can create bundles or collections of useful stuff that you can share with others, which can save you and your organization a great deal of time and effort. It can also be a lots of fun to discover some interesting and informative collections that others have taken the time to build for you.
RSS Feed Bundles
Google has unveiled a slick way to create what they call “bundles” of RSS feeds. These are actually just collections of related RSS feeds that you pick. For example, here’s a bundle that I created in a couple of minutes which aggregates all of the sites from the GigaOM Network: Read the rest of this entry »
Like many other Google products, Google Reader has built-in keyboard shortcuts. Learning these shortcuts can save you lots of time, as you don’t have to take your hands from the keyboard and can perform tasks faster.
Google Reader has an extensive list of available shortcuts. It would take quite a bit of effort to learn how to use them all, so in this post I’m just going to share those that I use every day to make trawling through my feeds a little bit faster. Read the rest of this entry »
I read a lot of online publications, and I like to share interesting articles with clients and friends on Twitter. If you use Google Reader to browse RSS feeds, as I do, it’s now easier to post links to news articles you’ve found in Google Reader to sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg.
In Google Reader’s Settings, you’ll now find an option called “Send To.” On that screen, you can specify which services you want to be able to post to. Once you’ve set it up, at the bottom of each article in the main Google Reader screen, you’ll see a “Send To” menu.
The system does work, but it’s decidedly low-tech. As an example, if you click “Send to Twitter,” Google Reader brings you to your Twitter account via a popup window, meaning that you’ll need to turn off popup blocking for google.com in your browser — something many people will prefer not to do. Read the rest of this entry »
Everyone has their favorite tricks to keep focused while working at the computer. Mine can be summarized as “out of sight, out of mind…but easily accessible.”
The Spaces function is one of the nicer features that I discovered in OS X when I started using a Mac as my main machine a couple of years ago. Spaces allows me to open programs in multiple virtual desktops, then move between them using mouse movements or hotkeys. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: adium, Facebook, Google Reader, Mac OS X, nambu, prism, remote desktop, songbird, spaces, twitter, virtual desktop
I’m dissatisfied with the current crop of “lifestreaming” apps. Overall, I think they’re missing a huge opportunity to help users focus their limited attention to the content that really matters.
Last week, for example, Simon covered the release of skimmer, a desktop client that brings together notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other services. Also recently launched is Cosmic Machine’s EventBox, a Mac-only application that similarly mashes together notifications and messages from a range of web services: Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr and Reddit, as well as the capability to import raw RSS feeds.
Both skimmer and EventBox are pretty and pull a variety of web services into a single stream of information. But as a heavy user of multiple social networks and web apps, neither provides me with any real ability to manage the stream of information I get from all those web services. As far as I can tell, all they really do is to move noise from several separate sources into a single cacophony of content. There are some limited filters to fish out particular keywords from the stream, but nothing that I couldn’t use an RSS reader -– like Google Reader -– to replicate.
So here’s what I’d love to see from lifestreaming tools: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: eventbox, Facebook, flickr, Google Reader, lifestreaming, Mac, Reddit, RSS, skimmer, tweetdeck, twitter
We all have to follow never-ending streams of information 
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
