Techno Medley

Pimping Your Twitter

thedigitalmuse — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 06:56:06 +0000

I’ve never really understood why so many blog posts about how to increase your twitter following focus on what you tweet. I am incredibly doubtful that very many people out there choose to follow other people because they’re posting profound messages. It seems like this would only matter when trying to keep followers – if you’re constantly sending out mundane stuff like “Going for parking space H4 today!”, chances are your number of followers is either 0 or approaching fast.

Why doesn’t it matter how you use twitter? Because most people don’t even know your twitter exists and those are the people you’re trying to reach and then con – I mean convince – into clicking Follow. Now, that’s not to say that it’s not possible to actively increase your following. Maki over at Dosh Dosh gives some excellent ways on how to do just that: “Drive web traffic to your profile. The more targeted the traffic, the better.”

Plus, it just feels wrong somehow to try tweeting a certain way simply to increase your following – Twitter is a communication tool, the end goal shouldn’t be to collect as many followers as possible. Robert Scoble has said a few times that he doesn’t define himself by who is or how many people are following him. Which, frankly, is easy to say when you’re sitting pretty at over 20,000 followers. I think most people would be lying if they said they didn’t care about having more followers. Oh, on an unrelated note, if you’d like to follow me on Twitter, you can do so here.

Individurls – Custom News Aggregator

thedigitalmuse — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:03:08 +0000

Individurls is a website that “lets you build your own custom news aggregator with content from the sites that you are interested in.” Essentially, it’s an RSS aggregator with one difference: unread feeds don’t build up. It’s kind of like opening a newspaper to look at all the latest headlines but all your old newspapers don’t build up in a pile in the corner of the room. Which is nice, because I’m a bit afraid of opening up NetNewsWire right now with its 2138 unread count.

Individurls also shows you all of your feeds at once, so it’s easy to scan everything to see what’s interesting.

Look at all that white space

Additionally, the site has a nice, clean design, something that’s incredibly important when you have a lot of content to read.

The site is very well thought out and all the little things that make or break a site like this are done well. Adding new sites to keep track of on your page is quick and painless. In addition, hovering your cursor over any feed item gives a pop-up box with a description.

Contrasted nicely to make it easy to read.

All in all, I don’t think this is going to replace my RSS aggregator. One of the things I love about NetNewsWire is that I’m able to look at all of my feeds even when offline, not to mention flag items. But I think Individurls aims to serve a different purpose anyway. I think it makes for a great browser homepage, because it gives you a quick glance at all the sites you normally check. For an example of an Individurls page, you can check out mine.

Fluid – Make Your Own Apps

thedigitalmuse — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:19:18 +0000

Sorry, Mac only. Fluid is an app that converts any web app (or website in general, really) to a destop application, complete with Dock icon, preferences, etc. This is particularly useful for those times when you have 20+ browser tabs open (i.e. all the time, in my case) but some site keeps crashing your browser. It’s also extremely useful for those sites you continually check, e.g. Digg, Twitter, Gmail. There are even a couple options for integrating your newly forged app: you can embed it in your desktop or you can hide it as a menu icon, next to the system clock and spotlight.

Digg icon sitting innocently on my status bar

Fluid does something simple and it does it well – the process isn’t complicated and it’s fast. Within about 30 seconds of downloading and installing, I had already created an app for Digg’s homepage.