How to organize life using twitter?

{Happy Birthday To Twitter, Today on 21st March 2010, little bird (twitter) is all grown up. }

Today in this article I am going to tell you some little tip to organize your life with twitter. Read my old article about how I have linked my social network.

Twitter is popular because of 2 main reasons, Simplicity & Accessibility. Twitter Updates (tweets) are just 140 character long, and you can post these update from any media e.g Browser, twitter clients, phone client, by SMS or even by writing down on paper.

For centuries there are 2 very popular ways of organizing life,
1.Note Making
2.ToDo List
Despite these things being a popular way of organizing life, majority of people fails to maintain a single note-book or a ToDo list, because if your life is so organized to maintain a ToDo List or notebook then probably you never need them. Point is, either you are using a paper, phone, iPod or your laptop to maintain your ToDo list , none of them is accessible all the time & everywhere. Eventually this accessibility problem is almost solved by twitter, So there can not be any better tool like twitter to organize your life.

I always loved 2 tools on web for maintaining my todo list and notes, because they are also accessible via twitter.

EverNote
EverNote is very nice note making tool. I am not going to tell you much about it. You can just go an try it. I love its web-clip boorkmarklet to take note while browsing. Addition to specific client it has for iPhone, Android and Win-Mobile, You can also add a note in EverNote by just @replying to @myen or send a DM(direct message) to it. Now since tweet can be posted by all ways described above , you can access your note from every where.

e.g
   note to self "kill all currupt politicians" @myen
OR
d myen think about explaination why photo frame is better than diamond necklace on valentine's day

Remember The Milk

Remember the milk has a very similar accessibility options as EverNote, the difference is in aproach, This is a ToDo list for task management. You can also access it by sending DM to @rtm

e.g.
d rtm pick up the milk
d rtm !complete call jimmy

Search Your Tweets
Here is last tip, Since twitter has become your primary place to dump thoughts, Its better to have a way to search your tweets. Twitter search is a real time search, it only gives you results from a very small time-frame, sometime you might like to search your old tweets. To get this functionality here is a hack, subscribe your twitter feed in Google Reader, Google readers stores all the feeds subscribed by you and indexes it, so that you can search them latter. RSS feed of your tweets will be at this address (if you have unprotected updates only)

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/[your TWITTER HANDLE].rss

Thanks for reading my blog. Hope this was helpful. Please share on twitter and Facebook if you liked it.

What is "Inbox Zero problem"? How To solve it by Twitter-way?

Inbox Zero problem is a usability problem, of which every mail system is infected with. Let me try to explain what it is?

Today, we get at least 40-50 mail every day, and our mail system marks every mail as unread when it arrives to your inbox. Now problem is, you are tempted to read all those mails to bring your inbox to zero unread count. This goes into a never ending loop often because by the time you will be able to finish each and every mail, you’ll get some new ones. 

This is a problem many other social networking platforms are infected with, may be not with the unread message count but by some other ways.

This is the only problem twitter is not infected with, because its always flowing timeline of short messages and you need to just look for few recent items posted by people, because of 2 reasons

1. Those items are not specifically posted to you (not talking about @replies).

2. Tweets are very spontaneous status update from people; significance of (most) tweets expires after sometime.

This is how people on twitter able to manage more and more people. I personally follow more than 600 tweeps around the world. Now, there is a problem!! Different people tweet at different pace, and many tweeters are so frequent on twitter is that they literally flood my timeline and kick other's tweets (from people whom i care more) out of my visible timeline. This problem is solved by lists, I group important tweeps in a list. Concept of list itself came from people and twitter client like TweetDeck & Seesmic. Think lists like this, On twitter you have public timeline which is the fastest moving timeline, and you filtered some of them to bring in our "friends" timeline by following them. When things became messy you sorted them into few smaller lists.

Twitter evolved from people's behaviour, like @replies, retweeting and many more became the built-in feature of twitter because we tweeps started using it.

So none of my time line is actually having inbox zero problem.

Now let’s come back to e-mail system, every day in office i really get more than 100 emails including companywide mails, group mail , mails from an on-going thread of discussion (where I don’t have anything to do).  Now what?? My mail client (outlook) is so cluttered with e-mail that finding the right email becomes very difficult. Ok , we have a solution “make rules to skip inbox for some known group & automated mails” BUT creating rule is not going to solve my problem because I am very lazy and don’t want to create rules even once in a six month (yes, that lazy i am). Last rule i created some 6 months back : P.

So what is the solution? Solution is simple; I call this solution "@actionItem". Which is like this, every mail which has some action item for me as individual then please include my name in a field called Action Item (like CC & To list). That’s It i will give priority to those mails first and then i will move to all other mails, and choose to skip if i don’t have much of time to spend. Inbox zero problem solved.

Twitter specific Terms : 

• Tweeps: people who use twitter.
• Tweeters:  twitter+ user
• Tweet:  Every small status update (post ) is called tweet.
• ReTweeting: when you post oneones update again is called re-tweeting. often done in "RT @TweepName : blah balh format".
• @replies : pronounced as 'at replies', are tweets which has your name mentioned, preceded with a '@' sign. 

Here is Merlin Mann Slide

Inbox Zero: Action-Based Email

View more presentations from merlinmann.

Here is video of his lecture

Un-official guide to twitter

This post is for the people who have joined twitter recently, and they are really finding it difficult to understand the common terms which are used on twitter. If you are regular tweeter (twitter user) then you will already be familiar with these words, but wait you can still enjoy reading these.

Twitter was started as a site where people were able to post their actions / feelings / opinions in plain text, which was having a restriction of 140 characters. This 140 character restriction is still there.

Every single post which you put on twitter is called tweet. your tweet can be read by all your followers and rest of the word. So when will you tweet, it will be visible to the whole universe, but then universe is so big; and not all people will know that you have jus tweeted . If someone really want to receive your tweet explicitly he will simply follow you. Once some one will follow you he will be able to see your tweet in his timeline. Additionally if some will visit you twitter page he can see your tweets, without following you.

Now your followers have simple way to read your tweet. They can read via web interface, or via SMS, or via any twitter client. A twitter client is easy way to access & post tweets. You can also use your mobile to post the tweet. Mobile is very nice way to tweet because you carry that all the time.

People who are there on twitter are referred as tweeple. Some people even say tweeps. If you find someone on twitter who is really sweet, you can also call him sweeple.

Now this is the nice time for you to post a tweet, saying that i am reading this blog and put the link of this blog on twitter. Since you have a restriction of 140 character, you might not be able to post the link as well as your comment. So you can user URL shortening services like tinyurl.com; tinyurl.com was the early default URL shortener of the twitter, Now twitter is using bit.ly site for shortening the URL.

Now once you tweet about this article, and eventually if i will see your tweet i might tweet a reply, which will star with @ followed by your twitter username.

e.g @Yourname thanks for tweeting.

This tweet will also be received by all my followers, but since they will see that it is directed by the @ symbol they will understand that I am saying just to you. Not to the whole world.  There is a unicast way to send a tweet just to you, which is called direct message, but most of the tweeple don't like that, because its after all a cool way to send you a @ reply rather than sending you a direct message, because you might not like it.

When twitter saw that people are using @ reply so often, they started hyper linking the @replies to your twitter page. This hyper linking will fail, if you mistype the person's username correctly.

When you find someone's tweet, and if you like it a lot, you can choose to retweet it.

e.g. RT @markandey: The 12 People You Dont Want to Meet on Facebook http://bit.ly/yUJPt

Retweeting is nice way to spread a news from my followers to your followers.

When you are tweeting something very specific you can put a special keyword in your message. Which is called hashtag.

e.g. I am enjoying lecture by person blah blah #sxsw

or e.g. Manchester united is playing great #FIFA

or e.g. Alonso is driving bad #F1

When twitter grew little more people started feeling superior if they had more number of followers. So people found a new way to introduce new tweeple to their followers. with a hashtag #followfriday. They usually post the recommendation on Fridays.

Twitter has built a huge community, and now they call this word as twitosphere. When you are not able to focus on your work because you are tweeting you can say you are twittcrastinating. So start using twitter now. It will be so much of fun. Oh ya, you can meet many of tweeple from your city by going to tweetup.

You can say tweet-a-later when you are going to sleep OR off to do some important work.

Chill yourself and use tweetactive API

tweetactive.com deals with activeness of people and keyword on twitter. Now tweetactive is exposing few APIs which might help you to build some cool badges which you can be hosted on your blog( or at different random places).

1.ProfileImage

This is simple REST API to get your twitter profile image. (
http://www.tweetactive.com/profileimage?q=yourtwitterid
you can directly display image like
    <img src=”http://www.tweetactive.com/profileimage?q=yourtwitterid”/>

2.getfancybadge
This is to show your tweetactiveindex. tweetactive index is dynamic time decaying value, which shows that how active you are on twitter.
TweetActiveIndex of yours will decay with time if you don't tweet. In one word: more the tweetactive index more you have tweeted in recently. The decay rate also depends on how much you have tweeted.
http://www.tweetactive.com/getfancybadge?id=yourtwitterid
    Note: this uses query string id.

 3.GetActivity
what ever you see on twitter badge can be retrieved in JSON format using this API.
http://www.tweetactive.com/getactivity?q=markandey&callback=hello

4.twittercompare

 

TwitterCompare is a REST CHART API, which shows you the real time motion chart to track the activeness of a keyword.
    simplest form is
http://www.tweetactive.com/twittercompare?q=keyword1,keyword2
you can resize the chart like
http://www.tweetactive.com/twittercompare?q=keyword1,keyword2&w=300&h=200
you can change the method for comparing
http://www.tweetactive.com/twittercompare?q=keyword1,keyword2&w=300&h=200&m=getkeywordactivity [default]
http://www.tweetactive.com/twittercompare?q=keyword1,keyword2&w=300&h=200&m=gettwitterlove
    gettwitterlove makes intelligent calculation and gets a value which will be corrected by the way people tweet. like iPhone might me popular keyword but popularity does not lies in using that keyword but when people praise the iPhone and not when they criticize it.
5.rtkey

http://www.tweetactive.com/rtkey?q=yourquery
View this page when you are lazy.
This is a real-time tracking portal where you can get real-time updates of any keyword on twitter. You need not to refresh the UI. refreshing is automatically done.
this page also displays the trending list at the top.
UI is deliberately made black to give your eyes some rest, while you lazily tracking some event.

Watch a demo on YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxAPV9e98x4

How To create multiple twitter account with single email account.

Hi,
Twitter allows you to create account which is directly mapped to your email ID. This makes the process difficult to create multiple twitter account with single email ID. After reading this blog post you will be able to create it.
Before that lets reveal 2 secrets of email addresses,
Fact-1
email address  is a string separated by symbol ‘@’.  the string before @ can be any character like ‘abcd’ or number ‘1234’. the character ‘.’ {dot} is ignored by SMTP server in the first part of email id.
i.e
firstname{dot}lastname{at}gmail{dot}com is same as firstnamelastname{at}gmail{dot}com

Fact-2
anything in the first part of the email address after ‘+’ is completely ignored by the SMTP servers.
i.e. firstname.lastname+anything{at}gmail.com is same as firstname.lastname{at}gmail{dot}com
cant believe this? try sending mails on these addresses and you will be surprised to see in your own inbox.
Creating Multiple Twitter Account
I guess now you got the idea!! while creating the twitter account you can use email ids like
firstname{dot}lastname+twitteraccount1{at}gmail.com
AND
firstname{dot}lastname+twitteraccount2{at}gmail.com
that's it you are done!!!. Go and experiment now!

How To Create Multiple Twitter Account With On

View more presentations from markandey.

Blu, Safari-4 and CoolIris

There are 3 new gr8 looking software available in the market now, i would like to blog about them

1.CoolIris: This is not new, but gr8, if u have ever missed please revisit http://www.cooliris.com/
2.Safari-4: Safari 4 is released yesterday, with nice UI enhancements. few things copied from Chrome. nice looking wall is added to show the top 16 site!! http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
3.Blu: Blu is gr8 looking twitter client for windows (claims that its for Vista and Windows7, but i can run WinXp as well, probably u need to install WPF  (latest .net framework) )

Blu is from http://www.thirteen23.com you can download it from here http://www.thirteen23.com/experiences/desktop/blu/#