This week’s thing is about keep current using a few different online tools: Twitter, RSS and Pushnote. Let’s just say upfront that I’m a big user of Twitter and have what some might consider an intimate knowledge of RSS. Pushnote however was new to me. So, let me talk about each of them a bit.
Twitter is a tool I use daily. In most cases what I post is links to articles that I find online and that I think will be of interest to my followers. That’s not to say that I don’t participate in the odd funny meme or two when I get a chance. This blog feeds into my Twitter account along with items I Digg, YouTube videos I favorite, and RSS items I share in Google Reader. From my POV, Twitter is like the central drop point for nearly everything I do on the Social Web. I currently follow 406 other Twitter users and don’t add someone all to often as I’m not sure I could handle many more. To do so, I use tools like Twitter’s lists and Seesmic to organize all the incoming information. I also treat Twitter like a real-time live conversation. If I’m not online I’m not participating. I don’t go back in the morning and see what I missed overnight. If it was important enough, someone will mention it while I’m around.
Maybe more important than Twitter is my Google Reader account. Here I subscribe to more than 850 feeds. Some post new information constantly, some hardly ever, most somewhere in the middle. I try to keep up with scanning all of it on a daily (if not nearly constant) basis but I’m not afraid to go away for a few days and then “mark all as read” when I get back. Like Twitter, if I miss something important, it’ll come across my radar soon enough.
Pushnote on the other hand was completely new to me. I signed up and installed the plugin on Monday and as of today, Friday, I’ve not seen that little star light up indicating content to read even once. Even when I signed up, none of my Twitter friends (I couldn’t get the Facebook connectivity to work) had Pushnote accounts. I do see the usefulness of this but I’ve tried similar services in the past and none of them have stuck with me. As with all social services, you need a certain critical mass of known people to make them work for you. Maybe this is one that’s more popular in the UK than here in the US.
