photo credit: Thomas Hawk

I am getting completely into the Friendfeed phenomenon, so much so that I am wondering what other features I can roll into it. I am not one for revealing my entire life, warts and all, but I can see the value of having my online life in the one place. It is such a great productivity booster and a great place to network with other people. If I have a question or a gripe then all I have to do is type it into Twitter or directly into Friendfeed and right away, it gets picked up by people and discussed. You can generate a RSS feed to stay on top of replies as well. The potential of Friendfeed is just downright amazing - and it just keeps getting better and better.

The other day I found out that I can generate a RSS feed for my iTunes purchases and thereby roll them into Friendfeed. I don’t have a problem with people knowing what music I listen to so I duly made the feed and added it to my Friendfeed page. But I am becoming acutely aware that there are some services that do NOT have RSS feeds and this, to me, is unacceptable, in this day and age of the internet.

One of the areas where RSS feeds is not really offered that much is when you leave comments on blogs. Most blog commenting areas have “no follow” tags therefore you can’t really set up Google Alerts either and get a RSS feed that way. This irritates me to no end because I do a lot of commenting on blogs and I would love to have all of that come together and collected on Friendfeed where it can be commented upon by others and discussed, thereby keeping the conversation going. But with a no follow tag (meaning it doesn’t get indexed in search engines) and no RSS feed, how can I get it onto Friendfeed?

Any suggestions?

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, comment, friendfeed, RSS, social

I often find it rather amusing how Twitter considers itself to be a “news service”.    I like Twitter and I write often about its merits but let’s get real here.    It’s not a news service.    If you want to be generous, call it a “snippet service”.   At a maximum 140 characters, it can’t really call itself a rival to CNN.

Yes, it may have beaten the news networks in reporting the China earthquake but is a Twitter message of “wow, what was that?   what is that shaking?” count as a serious breaking news headline?    I don’t think so.    Come on.    Get real people.    I somehow don’t think Wolf Blitzer is insecure in his Situation Room.

Technorati Tags: china, earthquake, news, social, Twitter

Socialphile Firefox Extension puts a small bar underneath your search results which shows you the popularity of that link on social networks such as Digg. It also gives you the link to digg it as well as the number of comments. Right away, you can see which search results are the most relevant and the most popular.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: Digg, extension, Firefox, search, social, socialphile

Like a lot of other people right now, I am going through a bit of a love affair with Friendfeed and I am reading what I can find on the service. Now that Friendfeed has opened up their API to developers, we are starting to see the first of the third-party services appearing. My favourite one is Imified’s IM updating bot.

(more…)

Technorati Tags: API, bot, chat, friendfeed, IM, imified, social

photo credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

A post I wrote for Make Use Of. The problem with having so many social networks is that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of them all. Plus it also becomes increasingly difficult for your online friends to keep track of you. So what’s the answer to this conundrum you ask? Use Friendfeed.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: friendfeed

A post I wrote for Make Use Of. I take a look at some of the third party apps out there to make your Digg experience a better one.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: Digg, social, social network, tools

A post I wrote for Make Use Of. Find out how to flag words, track phrases and use automated bots to simplify your life. We will also take a look at some of the third party apps out there that remove the need for you to even use the Twitter website.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: Make Use Of, social network, tools, Twitter, web

All you have to do is enter the URL of the Digg story that you want to follow and the application will show any captured buries once you click the submit button. Results show Reason for Bury, Digg Count at Time of Bury, Bury Count, Time/Date of Bury, and Area of Digg. Quite useful to see why a story suddenly disappeared.

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: bury, Digg, webtools

If you’ve been a subscriber to this blog for any length of time, you’ll have noticed that sometimes you will get a post with my recent del.icio.us links in it (courtesy of an automated service by Feedburner). In the past couple of days, that post has suddenly got bigger.

This is all due to a brilliant Greasemonkey script that I have found called Delicious Stumbles. It basically adds a button to your standard Del.icio.us submission box which allows you to submit the same link, along with the same description and keywords, to Stumbleupon at the same time.

This is an absolute God-send for me. I love using Del.icio.us and Stumbleupon but at heart I am a bit lazy and I like things to be simple. If I bookmark one site on one bookmarking site, I am normally not inclined to start the process to submit it to the other site.  It’s too much time and too much clicking around. So as a result, I go through a big del.icio.us phase then a big Stumbleupon phase, then back to del.icio.us again…..this makes being a member of these sites rather haphazard as no-one knows when my next contribution will be. This has meant I have never been able to gain any traction or momentum on these sites.

But the Delicious Stumbles script means I can now submit to both sites simultaneously and it works PERFECTLY!

If you use Firefox and Del.icio.us / Stumbleupon, I highly recommend you use this script!

Technorati Tags: delicious, Firefox, Greasemonkey, hack, hacks, script, social network, Stumbleupon

Well it didn’t take me long to get tired of the Google Talk / Twitter combo. I still love Google Talk and Twitter but I felt that Twitter was slowly hi-jacking my GTalk application with its fast moving updates. Despite its benefits, Twitter really is a catch-22. To keep updates under control, you need to be selective with your contacts but to get the full benefit out of it, you need to have as many contacts as possible.

This is where using GTalk became problematic - the updates were coming in so thick and fast that I had to eventually turn off the notification window - which resulted in me missing important IM messages from business clients. My girlfriend also got tired of Google Talk constantly opening flashing orange windows and she often shut Google Talk down - which cut me off from clients. Third of all, the flashing orange windows were wrecking my concentration and productivity. But I need Twitter constantly on to network. So in the end, something had to give.

For the past few days, I was testing some alternative Twitter programs and I was unsure which one to go with. But it was Amit Agarwal’s post today that made me settle on TWhirl. It runs on the Adobe AIR platform and I am a big fan of AIR. I have previously posted on other AIR platforms such as DiggTop and the Google Analytics desktop app. I also use the Pownce desktop AIR app on a regular basis.

One of the big advantages of TWhirl is that it only collects updates from Twitter every few minutes (a maximum of 60 requests to the Twitter server per hour). This means that updates come in much more slowly so it becomes easier to read each update and ponder it / respond to it before the next update comes through. This took a lot of getting used to at first (in fact it was so slow that I was convinced it was broken!) but now I am totally hooked on the idea. My desktop has calmed down and I no longer feel compelled to frantically speed-read all of the updates that come in.

Some other excellent positives about TWhirl :

• No beeping or other notification noise unless you ask for it. I currently have it set only to beep if I receive a direct message or reply.
• No flashing windows.
• TWhirl can be kept on top of all other windows. So I can work in the browser and have TWhirl updating to the right of my screen at all times.
• You can specify the size and style of the font on the interface. So if Arial doesn’t float your boat, change it to something else.
• You can make the interface transparent so you can see your browser window underneath it.
• You can see the photo associated with each Twitter account. It’s really nice to be able to put a face with a name.
• Multiple-account management.   If you’re a “super-Twitter” and maintain several accounts, you can easily switch between them in TWhirl.

The program does take a bit of getting used to though. For example, normally if you want to find out the details of a Twitter you are not currently following, you would use the command “whois :”. But in TWhirl, this doesn’t seem to work too well. Instead, it’s faster to just click on the Twitter username and the details will be instantly displayed in the window. What I found neat about this is that by typing a username into TWhirl, it will show you the last 20-30 updates that person made. So you can see right away if that person is worth following. Google Talk didn’t give me that functionality.

Another thing - which will eventually become annoying - when I was using Google Talk, my Twitter contacts were basically portable. When I was at a computer - any computer - I could log into Gmail and the integrated chat window would open up with Twitter updates. So wherever I was and whatever I was doing, I could log in and keep on top of Twitter. But now that I have moved to TWhirl, I would need to rely on the other computer also having TWhirl - or use the Twitter webpage instead. So a portable TWhirl for the USB stick would be nice at some point in the future.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, AIR, application, desktop, TWhirl, Twitter