How do you keep up with FriendFeed and Twitter… AlertThingy anyone?
In a past post, Is FriendFeed the feed for me?, I started a little experiment to aggregate all of my various [tag]social media[/tag] traffic. It has been an interesting experiment, and I must admit I am somewhere in the middle of being completely irritated and completely thrilled at how useful the offering has been.
I’m not a big fan of the layout, but there are some tweaks I could use to help with that if I wanted to go to the trouble (e.g. [tag]Firefox[/tag] and [tag]GreaseMonkey[/tag]). However, I like to keep things as simple as possible (shhh, don’t tell the people I work with I said that).
The interface itself is a little bare to me, and it is a bit strange to keep up with the information, but it is certainly much better than going to every single other feed right? Well, not exactly … I still do that quite a bit to - mainly because I like the presentation on the host site much better. This is even true in my [tag]RSS[/tag] reader as well.
I would venture to guess, there are quite a few people that consume their social media this way, that is scan all of the information and remove what you are not interested in and then prepare your meal of information for the night.
So after using FriendFeed for a little while, I noticed a majority of the traffic were tweets from Twitter. For those of you not familiar with [tag]Twitter[/tag], it is simply a way to be just a little more hyper-connected. A [tag]tweet[/tag] is a post of 140 words or less updating those who “follow” you (friends) what you are up to and what you are thinking.
Needless to say, I decided to expand my base a bit, and signed up for a Twitter account. With all of the traffic on Twitter, I needed a real time client, like an Instant Messaging client. [tag]GoogleTalk[/tag] was supposed to fit the bill, but come to find out, there are evidently some issues with trying to use GoogleTalk with a hosted domain… and I really didn’t want to spend more than a few minutes figuring that out. Just too many other things going on.
I kept seeing alerts posted on [tag]FriendFeed[/tag] called [tag]AlertThingy[/tag]. Come to find out, AlertThingy was created using FriendFeed’s own API for managing the updates that come through FF in a desktop client format. An added benefit was that I can also interact with Twitter. How’s that for good timing.
I just installed this tonight, and have found it easy to setup and configure. Now the trick is whether I will be able to keep better track of the activity going on in these various mediums.
I’ll keep you posted, and I would love to hear your comments…
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ChangeForge... a catalyst to affect the paradigm by Ken Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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