Web Worker Daily

Now that Bing and Google will be displaying tweets from Twitter and status messages from Facebook, web workers will need to consider how much, and how publicly, we wish to interact with these two social networks.

Twitter

If you’re like I am, your Twitter stream is probably public. For me, the value of Twitter is its ability to let me share news and comments that current and potential clients may find useful. I also use it as a way of interacting with clients if our regular communication channels are down.

So I certainly don’t say anything using @chcs (my company Twitter account) that can’t be public. I also have a personal Twitter feed, @HamiltonChas, that mostly focuses on my comments regarding local politics. I also tweet using @GrowTrains, an account that reflects my interest in improving passenger train service. 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 »

Today marks the highly anticipated release of Tweetie for the Mac by atebits, developer of the iPhone version of the same app. Tweetie has enjoyed tremendous success on the iPhone, and for my money is far and away the best mobile client for my web workflow. Which is why I was first in line to download the new Mac client it this a.m. and see if it might be an improvement over Nambu, my current desktop Twitter solution. Olly Farshi over at our sister site TheAppleBlog has a full review, but I wanted to look at it specifically with web work in mind.

Things started off well, since Tweetie offers a full-featured, ad-supported free version in addition to a $19.95 (currently on sale for $14.95) ad-free version. I can live with one ad per hour in my tweet stream in exchange for a great free program. Heck, half of the tweets of those I’m following are probably ads anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

Nambu is a free social messaging client for Mac OS X. It’s still in beta, but it has swiftly become my client of choice for professional tweeting, thanks to its easy switching between Twitter accounts and a great interface.

At the end of last month, fellow WWD writer Imran Ali posted a wish-list for lifestreaming apps, those efficient little consolidation tools that are supposed to help make sense of the social network mess we’ve got ourselves into. There’s no doubt, as Imran suggests, that these apps could be doing a lot more than just putting everything in one place, which is really what most actually do when you get right down to it.

I was optimistic that maybe Nambu would provide something out of the ordinary, but it remains to be seen what kind of cross-service interaction will appear, since the current Nambu beta only supports Twitter accounts. Future versions will implement support for identi.ca, FriendFeed and Ping.fm, but they aren’t accessible in Nambu’s preferences as of yet.

Still, even without support for additional services, Nambu is a very useful little program with a feature-set that’s sure to please Twitter users who dislike TweetDeck’s cluttered interface. It more closely resembles an instant messaging application than most Twitter clients, and it offers IM-like features as well. Read the rest of this entry »