I got this idea of this arti­cle after me and Java­Junky talk­ing and given a tuto­r­ial of how Twit­ter works to a cou­ple of our friends at my birth­day party.  When they went home, 3 peo­ple were on Twit­ter.  I guess me and Java­Junky did a good job on the sales pitch.

Twit­ter started out as a very sim­ple idea: “What are you doing?”  At first, I wasn’t sold on the idea that I want to tell my friends where I am at, what I’m eat­ing, sleep­ing etc… I see no point and pro­duc­tiv­ity, a waste of time and add more junk to the web.  One day I was vis­it­ing NPR (National Pub­lic Radio) web­site and I saw them that they are on Twit­ter.  So I started to fol­low them.  That day on, I saw the light. Instead of pop­ping out your emails, open up your RSS reader, or going through a web­site just to search news those are inter­est­ing to you, they are deliv­ered to you almost instantly with a short descrip­tion and a link.  As you fol­low more peo­ple on the topic that you are inter­ested in, the more news you can get.  Because I sit in front of a com­puter most of the time and as many of the web nerds are, I have Tweet­Deck or Twhirl open pretty much all the time.  I hon­estly learn more new things in the past 2 months using Twit­ter as a news ser­vice than wait­ing for my sub­scrip­tion emails to arrive once a week or once a month.

Before Tweet­ing, I highly rec­om­mend using Last­Pass.  You will never have to remem­ber another pass­word but one pass­word – it is acces­si­ble any­where, and can ran­domly gen­er­ates strong pass­words for you. Even you don’t know the pass­words, so won’t the hack­ers… I hope :P

Twit­ter from anywhere

If you don’t have a fancy iPhone or Inter­net access, well, you don’t have to.  If you are in the U.S. you can just send a text mes­sage to 40404.  If you are out­side of the U.S. you can find out the number:

Keep­ing your wanted tweets and fil­ter out the ones that you don’t want!

Twit­ter to Blogs:

Note: Since I am a Word­Press user, I can only say what I know of Word­Press.  I don’t know about other blog ser­vices.  Just throw­ing out an idea…

Now you got all of these new infor­ma­tion, you’ll prob­a­bly get over­whelmed by all the infor­ma­tion that you are NOT inter­ested in.  But how do you keep the ones you that you want and fil­ter out other junk?  The eas­i­est is to set up a blog such as Word­Press and add on a plu­gin called Twit­ter Tools (although it is dated for WP 2.7.1., but still works in WP 2.8.1.) – RT (retweet) the tweets that you like, and tell the plu­gin to do a daily or weekly digest of your tweets.   It’ll grab all of your tweets.  You can also set it to not grab any tweet with @ at the begin­ning, so very flex­i­ble.  Voila!  You now have a daily jour­nal basically.

Book­mark­ing with Deli­cious (http://delicious.com/)

Of course, the tra­di­tional way is to book­mark your links.  I pre­fer and highly rec­om­mend Deli­cious that because it comes with a very sim­ple to use yet pow­er­ful Fire­Fox addon. With one click, you can save your book­mark, tag them and find them again extremely fast and easy.  But hey, if you pre­fer Digg, Stum­le­Upon… by all mean.

The Power of Twitter

Tweecious is a Fire­Fox addon that auto­mat­i­cally grabs the past 1000 tweets and sep­a­rate them in tags.  I doubt that is help­ful because not all of them you want to keep, and there are repeated tweets, or just down right to use­less tweets.  You’ll end up get­ting more junk than qual­ity infor­ma­tion.  The get qual­ity tweets you just have to screen them your­self.  No easy way out.

Twit­ter to Ever­note (http://www.evernote.com/)

I just started to use Ever­note for a few weeks, and I don’t know how I could live with­out it now.  Ever­note is a pow­er­ful soft­ware that allow you to cre­ate Note­books from writ­ing down your diary, doing research, gro­cery list, backup your mp3, videos, files, or to keep­ing book­marks.  Although, I don’t like it keep­ing my book­marks, it’s a waste just to insert a link.  You can then later access the exact same infor­ma­tion on the web, on another com­puter that has Ever­note installed, or even a Sand­Dish U3 thumb drive.  Ever­note can be also shared with other peo­ple, pub­licly or friends for col­lab­o­ra­tions such as work­ing on a project.  Lastly, you can “web clip” any­thing on your screen, or high­light text on a page then send to Ever­note as a new note.  Pow­er­ful research tool.  You can also use your cell phone, take a pic­ture, and email directly to Ever­note as stor­age or what­ever you want.

Now, back to Twit­ter.  Twit­ter can also send a quick note via Twit­ter sim­ply by fol­low­ing myEN, then every time you have a link or tweet that you want to keep, just add @myEN any­where inside the tweet, it’ll be auto­mat­i­cally send to your Ever­note account.  The bad thing about is that you can’t tag, and it can only be sent to Evernote’s default note­book.  You’ll have go back to add tags and move the note to the cat­e­gory you want.

Twit­ter to Remem­ber the Milk (http://rememberthemilk.com/)

Remem­ber the Milk is an online tasks ser­vice, and get reminders for tasks.  Great for gro­cery shop­ping lists ;-)   The thing is, RTM uses Twit­ter as an input ser­vice also.  All you have to do is to fol­low @rtm (http://twitter.com/rtm), and every­time you want to add a new task. All you have to do is send it a DM (Direct Mes­sage) by typ­ing: “d rtm have lunch with mom on Sun @ 1pm”.  Scary enough that RTM knows to add that task as:

Task: have lunch with mom

When: Sun­day @ 1:00pm

But it’ll only send to your “Inbox”, and you can­not add tags and loca­tions to the task.  Although, you can apply these com­mands. I per­son­ally like to sit down at home and add all of my gro­cery, and then grab the list through Twit­ter on the phone when I’m at the store.  Or add some­thing quick to remind me later through my phone or Twit­ter desk­top app such as Twit­ter­Deck, Twirl etc… it can also send you a DM through Twit­ter to remind you of your tasks also.

Twit­ter to GCal through Twit­ter­Cal: http://twittercal.com/

Just like RTM and myEN, all you have to do is to fol­low GCal, then just send a direct mes­sage to GCal to add a new event to your GCal.  The prob­lem is, it doesn’t seem to be work­ing because GCal did not fol­low me back after I fol­lowed them, and you can­not DM some­one unless they’re fol­low­ing you also.  GCal finally fol­lowed me back, it is pretty slick!  You can add What, when, where, and who.  But only What and when are nec­es­sary.  Visit twittercal.com for full instructions!

Sav­ing the best for last: Mashup

Dial2Do (http://dial2do.com/)

I just dis­cov­ered this ser­vice a few days ago and boy, it is awe­some!  Dial2Do is a “mashup” tool.  You can tweet, send pic­tures, voice clips, pic­tures to Ever­note, or add a task to your RTM, add a new event to your choice of cal­en­dar ser­vice, all by just dial­ing their given number.

Cur­rently, it is in Beta and it is all FREE to use!  They did state that even­tu­ally they’ll charge some­thing, but it prob­a­bly worth it.  Jott is another sim­i­lar ser­vice, they charge rea­son­able prices for the ser­vices.  I have not tried them because I’m broke, and I got Dial2Do :)

Con­clu­sion

The prob­lem of using Mashup ser­vice or Twit­ter to do other tasks that you can­not tag your items, and add them to cer­tain cat­e­gory.  Are hash­tags (Exam­ple: #tag1, #fire­fox) really that hard to imple­ment?  But nonethe­less, these are very use­ful tools when you’re not around a com­puter but with a mobile phone.

How are you using Twit­ter to orga­nize your life?  Are there more use­ful tools that you want to share?

Related Posts

No related posts.