Web Worker Daily

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 »

There is never enough time in the day to keep up with the constant barrage of social media. Take Twitter, for example. Almost daily I have clients and colleagues ask me “Isn’t Twitter really a waste of time?” and “I hear Twitter is losing users faster than they’re gaining them, so why should I join?” The rest of us who are on Twitter — even those of us who have been using it for years — are still figuring out how to best fit Twitter into our overall communications toolkit.

So how do you keep from “wasting” time on Twitter? Here’s my advice on how to spend no more than 15 minutes a day on your Twitter account but still reap the rewards, particularly for your work. This is not a good tactic for everyone, but if you or someone you know is very resistant to Twitter and simply needs a manageable plan for tweeting, you can try this at work or home. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Listening has always been important, but now in the world of social media where conversations are amplified, repeated and spread at a much faster rate than ever before, listening has become even more critical. Many of us, particularly freelancers, don’t have teams of people responsible for customer service and support to help make sure that we are listening to our customers, potential customers and industry experts. We have to find the time to listen to what people are saying about us and react appropriately.

Photo by Flickr User Orange_Beard under Creative Commons

Josh Bernoff wrote about the modern listening problem and compares it to those speaker phones where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. On those not-full-duplex speaker phones, you are either talking or listening, but not doing both at the same time. In the social media age, we need to be both listening and talking, but many people are only doing one or the other. On Twitter and other social web sites, we talk about what we are doing and listen to other people talk, and we do it simultaneously. Read the rest of this entry »

As a freelancer, I spend most of my time trying to manage information overload. Like Charles, I use spaces to quarantine focused work from other distractions, and I have some tricks for efficient RSS reading, creative uses of RSS to increase efficiency, and filtering techniques to help reduce the time I need to spend consuming information. Despite this obsession with efficiently gathering information, there are also times when I actively seek out information overload.

While a fire hose of notifications and feeds can be too distracting when I’m working on things for client, if I’m looking for inspiration for a new blog post or new venture of some sort, I want to see as much information as possible in the hope that something will catch my eye and provide the inspiration that I need.

Here are a few of my favorite tools for embracing information overload. Please beware that these tools are known to sap productivity and suck up precious hours that can never be regained! Use these techniques at your own risk. Read the rest of this entry »

TweetDeck, the multi-column Twitter desktop client that we’ve covered previously, yesterday released a free iPhone app. I’ve been playing with the app today, and I have to say that I’m impressed: It’s a very nicely designed, easy-to-use client that makes Twittering while on the road a breeze.

Installing the app and setting up your account is simple — just enter your username and password. By default, TweetDeck sets up three columns: “All Friends,” “Mentions,” and “DM.” “All Friends” contains your entire Twitter feed; “Mentions” contains tweets mentioning your username (@replies); and “DM” contains your direct messages. You can navigate between columns by swiping left and right. Tapping zooms in so that the column fills the entire screen. Tap on a tweet, and the screen fills with the tweet, and you’re presented with options for sending an @reply, replying by DM, retweeting, favoriting, and emailing the tweet.

On all screens, there’s a large button at the top-right that will let you compose a new tweet. The compose screen includes everything you’d expect, including a character counter, URL shortening and photo support. In all, the interface is very intuitive and looks great. Read the rest of this entry »

In earlier posts, I provided some tips for improving your Twitter efficiency and mining Twitter for information. While both of these provide useful ways to utilize Twitter, you also need to be prepared to respond to other people quickly. Twitter is a short-attention-span medium, where tweets that are minutes old may already be obsolete. You don’t want to skip over any important information or miss the chance to respond. Here are my top three real-time monitoring tools for Twitter.

Don’t Underestimate Twitter Search

For simple monitoring, this is the way to go. If you only want to monitor a single keyword or a small number of keywords, you can easily use the built-in Twitter search in your web browser. You can even use a fairly complex set of search operators to construct great searches. It updates frequently and lets you know how many new items have arrived since your last refresh. It also displays the number of new items right in the browser tab to make it easy to notice without paying much attention to the page.  Sometimes you just can’t beat simple and unobtrusive. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »