Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Thing 31: More Twitter

I just made a rough count of how many links there were to this Thing--articles, applications, badges, etc.--and came up with 118. If all the More 23 Things have that many links to explore, it truly will be a challenge to get through the program by May 20.

Suffice it to say that clicking through those approximately 118 links to do Thing 31 wasn't happening, especially as I still haven't warmed up to Twitter in the first place (but as promised, I do drop by and update it every now and then and scramble to keep up with others' tweets). I ended up skimming the list, trying to pick out the most promising. Since Thing 27, we have set up a Twitter account at work, so I forwarded the links to David Lee King's posts to our Twitterer. I also glanced over the "9 Ways Twitter Can Help in the Real World" article. I guess I've been hanging out in a law library too long: when the author jokingly listed becoming a super-stalker as one of the 9 hints, I just went, "No, that really isn't funny," and stopped reading right then. (After which, "Get Facebook friends to use Twitter without them even knowing" sounded downright creepy).

Of all the "fun" things listed for Twitter, the most attractive was the one that integrated it with LibraryThing. After all, unlike Twitter, I enjoy using LT. But then I was done in by being too much of a cataloger: when it said that it searched Amazon as the default, I just couldn't bear it (I use Library of Congress as my first search site)!

I've been more attracted to Twitter when I haven't been working through the Twitter website itself. I've got TwitterFon on my iPod touch, and it streamlines Twitter nicely. It's also easy to use when I'm out and about--which is about the only time I'm doing anything interesting enough that I'd consider twittering. I'm interested in TweetDeck too, but it's too big for a dial-up connection to handle and I haven't gotten around to downloading it somewhere else to my flash drive and carrying it home. So as you may guess, since the web is my least favorite way of accessing Twitter, I haven't done a thing with my Twitter page other than choose one of the most basic templates.

No one writes neutrally about Twitter, do they? I glanced over "The 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance" and noted that acceptance is considered the desireable outcome. Even the suggested articles for those of us "struggling" with Twitter (I am not struggling: it's not terribly complicated to use) mostly seemed to take the approach that using Twitter is what we should want to do. "The Limitations of Twitter" was irrelevant to my situation. I wanted to point out to the author of "What Exactly is the Point of Twitter?" that maybe his friends were constantly on Twitter, so that it made sense for him to check in multiple times a day and stay in touch with them that way, but my friends mostly aren't on Twitter at all, so why should I bother? That said, I did enjoy "The Inspiration that is Twitter." I don't hate Twitter and I find the phenomenon itself interesting--I just resent feeling pressured to enjoy it (sort of, if you don't find Twitter to be a crucial element of your social networking experience, you're obviously not using it properly).

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Thing 30: More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious

I see there is a slight misunderstanding here. Having read through Thing 30, it sounds like the More 23 Things program believes that I am actively pursuing more RSS feeds to follow, more websites to be kept abreast of, etc., and is helpfully offering me tools to manage the flood of updates. At present, I have a talent for finding RSS feeds that rarely update at all, so I'm only having to handle 10-20 updates/day. It just seems like overkill to filter them. I don't particularly want anything emailing my RSS feeds to me--if I'm online, I can just check Google Reader or Bloglines--and if they're sent to my cell phone, I'm going to end up paying for them.

Since I wasn't finding the "normal" use of RSS enhancers all that tantalizing, I decided to poke around some of the more creative applications. Simpletracking.com sounds promising. I get a bit obsessive about wondering where my packages are, and I have a tendency to leave the confirmation emails with the tracking numbers in accounts I can't access except at home. I was disappointed to see that UPS doesn't want to play with them, since most of my packages are sent via UPS, but I will try them out the next time someone sends me something via FedEx. Or the post office, for that matter. The post office's tracking system is horrid; I suppose Simpletracking.com isn't going to be able to do anything about that.

ReminderFeed looks really useful. It seemed a bit...um...simple. Like, all I had to do was come up with something to be reminded about, plus a password? That's it? I can handle that.

I did try adding RSS feeds to my homepage and this blog. I took them off again, though. I'm satisfied with leaving a button for Google Reader in my bookmarks and Delicious toolbars and checking it when I'm in the mood. I've also got a Bloglines account, but it doesn't seem to do things much differently than Google Reader, so it mostly feels like duplication. I had been hoping that Bloglines could handle feed authentication--Google Reader adamantly refuses to do so (perhaps because their blogs can't be made private, so you don't need feed authentication to read them?)--but it seems to choke on it as well. Rumor has it that FeedDemon manages it, but I'm running out of energy to just keep signing up for new accounts everywhere.

Okay, okay, I admit I underutilize Delicious. But it just feels horribly sloppy to bookmark tons of things I'll never visit again. It wasn't until Thing 30, though, that I realized that here you're supposed to be making connections (the network) with people you don't know and aren't communicating with. I thought this was like Facebook, where there was supposed to be more of a personal connection, and since I hardly know anyone who uses Delicious--that's more like, many people I know use it, but I don't know their usernames there--I felt sort of alone. No, no--I shall now go forth and connect with all sorts of strangers. How unnatural for me.

I do like the idea of Tagrolls and Linkrolls. I'm going to finish up this post and then see if I can get one on 23 Distractions without screwing up the layout too badly.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Thing 29: Google Tools

So many options, so little time. What to play with first?

I started with Google News. I'd used Newsvine for my news ever since Thing 12--which is to say, I'd used Newsvine for a while, finding it to be the least obnoxious of the social media sites, and eventually reverted to picking up headlines here and there instead. Dang it, I don't want my media to be social. I rarely even read the reader comments attached to a news story. Using Newsvine or Digg or the other social media sites was like trying to read the newspaper while sitting in a room filled with people I didn't know calling back and forth to each other about what they'd just read or had seen online or whatever: hard to concentrate. Hmph. >:(

This Thing was the first I'd heard of Google News (I suppose it's listed on various Google pages, but it hadn't caught my attention), and I was wary--please, not another social media site! Much to my relief, Google is going to try to customize the news to what it thinks I want to read, not the most popular news of a bunch of people I may have nothing in common with.

My initial reaction leans toward the positive. It'll take a while to get used to the layout, but it always takes me a while to do that. I mean, I'm not entirely used to Newsvine's layout, and that's been how many months? Google's preference for simple layouts serves them well here, although the sheer number of links on the page is pushing that simplicity to the limits. There were a couple of glitches--for example, I tried to sign up for the local news of St. Paul, MN and ended up with the local news of a St. Paul somewhere in Canada--but they were worked out quickly. I liked the timeline feature, although when I clicked on what I thought was a story from 2004, I ended up with one from 2008. And ye gods, I'm lazy: it feels like such an effort to scroll down and get the news past the first part of the screen!

For productivity tools (oh goody, we're back to productivity tools!), I chose Gmail. I've been using Gmail for a while, actually; it's the email I've been using for all the Things that demand registration. I did a bit with labels back when I used this email for mailing lists, but that was about as far as my experimentation got. But for a while now, I've been thinking that this may become my main email address, and so it was time to take a closer look at it. I'd never poked into the Labs that I can recall. Now I've done so and have set up the gadget that warns you that you might be about to send an email without its attachment. And now I know why some emails have a > in front of them while others have a >>. Cool.

Drawbacks? Well, I'm still on dial-up at home, and Gmail is definitely oriented toward high-speed connections. Yes, there's the option to go for basic HTML, which delivers the mail just fine, but a lot of the fun features disappear (and no visiting the Labs while you're on basic HTML). I'm still a bit cautious about storing my main email online forever--never mind that I've had how many computers crash on me at home and have barely saved my downloaded archives each time? But in all the time I've had this address, Google has done an excellent job of weeding out the spam--that's practically enough to make me switch regardless of any other feature.