5 ways Twitter can streamline your life and enhance productivity

Increasingly, Twitter is becoming a funnel for performing various actions that you perform in life, but have to go to different avenues to perform them. Its like this catch-all that takes what you give it and as long as you have configured things correctly, knows what to do with it and automagically takes care of the action item. Here I list out a few such available services that help you do just that.

1. Todo: Two of the most popular todo services that bring together online/desktop/mobile experience well are Remember the Milk and Toodledo. I currently use Toodledo and love it. To add a todo, I only have to send a direct message to ‘Toodledo’ and can add anything to my tasks lists very quickly. It also supports simple syntax to specify other options like priority, folder and due date from within that one line direct message.

Example Tweet: ‘D Toodledo Respond to David’s VM #Today’

2. Calendar: Google Calendar is arguably one of the most popular calendars that people use. If you want to add an event, it can be quite a task to visit the site and add an event. I use TwitterCal to connect my Google calendar with Twitter. Once set up, you just send a direct message to ‘gcal’ and quickly add events to your calendar.

Example Tweet: ‘D gcal Meeting with paul tomorrow at 7pm’

3. Notes: Evernote is one of the best services available for this. If you are not familiar with it or have not tried it, you should. From Wikipedia: ‘Evernote is a collection of software and services that allows users to collect, sort, tag and annotate notes and other miscellaneous information.’. It brings together all these notes seamlessly with mobile apps and online access. Notes can be added by sending a direct message to ‘myEN’ Imagine being able to take a quick note of something by quickly sending a direct message to the service. Very efficient.

Example Tweet: ‘D myEN January phone bill confirmation number 34529812′

4. Movies: NetFlix is my service of choice along with many other people. So many times, a friend would recommended a movie to me and I either had to remember the name to add it later (which rarely happened) or lose that recommendation altogether. Once I got the iPhone, I tried to make it better by almost always keeping one of the browser windows open with Netflix and add the movie directly by searching for the movie name and adding it to my queue. That was until I discovered AddNetflix. The service lets you add a movie to your account by sending a direct message to it at ‘addnetflix’ so now, as long as I have a twitter client open, it only takes a few seconds to add a movie.

Example Tweet: ‘D addnetflix Avatar’

5. Share Links: If you are someone who likes to share links of interesting articles and pages with your network of people, Twitterfeed makes it simple for you. Earlier, I maintained a blog where most of my blog posts were nothing but the few interesting links I found during the day. If you use an RSS reader like Google reader or Feeddemon, you can use the ‘star’ or ‘share’ feature to create an RSS feed out of all the posts you mark. Twitterfeed lets you link your twitter account with this feed and periodically tweets these links on your behalf. So now, if I find something interesting, I just click ‘Share’ and the rest is taken care of by Twitterfeed.

Example Tweet: N/A.

Summary

The biggest reason why this helps me streamline my life is because of the abundance of Twitter clients available. I use Twitlet, Twitterbar and Tweetdeck on a regular basis. Essentially, at almost all times, a textbox for me to tweet something is readily available thus making it very quick and simple for me to perform the other tasks through the services mentioned above. If you have any comments/suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

10 Twitter Manners – how to gather good Twitter karma

If you are a citizen of Twitterverse, you may have found some etiquette of Twitterers that impress you and some that annoy you. Here is a list of Twitter manners that, I think, define your Twitter karma

1. When someone asks you a question, answer it
2. When its not your opinion, please add a RT or via @xxxx who was the originator of that opinion. If you read something on a popular site and it does have a Retweet button, use it. If it doesn’t have a retweet button, its ok to post a link to the article. If people find it interesting , they would visit the site anyway. If you have feeds set up to automatically tweet things you like, it is ok not to add a via.
3. When someone follows you and retweets you often, and you are not a Mashable or a Scobleizer, return the favor.
4. If someone says something good about your work, your blog, your site.. say a Thank You. Retweet it if you want to. If your work is very popular and you get loads of good feedback, then don’t keep retweeting every praise you get. Be humble.
5. Be honest. Don’t say things you don’t mean or don’t have claim to. For e.g., don’t read the comments of an article and rephrase it in your own words claiming them to be yours.
6. If you want someone to RT something, don’t force it on them. Say it in kind words like “Please RT if you like”
7. If you requested someone to RT something and they did , thank them
8. Don’t rephrase someone’s tweet unless you need to shorten it. If there a bunch of names in the via or RT, then its ok to remove all the retweeters to shorten it , but retain the originataor of that tweet.
9. Don’t automate your direct messages… that’s extremely spammy. However it is nice to introduce yourself or exchange an Hi with someone who you find interesting and who follows you.
10. Help people and they will help you back. Show some kindness and it will come back to you. There is Karma in Twitterverse as well

How socially private are you?

The world of social networks is changing the entire concept of privacy.  Like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently said that privacy is not a social norm anymore. I have been mulling over this for a bit now -how much information am I willing to give out?  How public am I willing to make my private life? Will I be peer pressured into it?  These thoughts led me to study some habits of social networkers and categorize them in three profiles based on how private they wish to be.

1. The Watcher: He believes firmly in his privacy or he probably doesn’t care about the virtual world much. Of course he has been pushed to join Facebook because his friends are on it and he can stay in touch with people without necessarily communicating with them. He watches everything. His friends’ status updates, photos, comments. Once in a while he “Likes” a link or a status, since that does not need him to present an opinion. He rarely updates his own status except when he is waiting at an airport or he watched an outstanding movie.  You know he is active since he accepts friend requests everyday on Facebook.  He joined Twitter but never went back to it. He didn’t understand the concept of following and being followed by random people. Or even if he did, he tweets irregularly. He has a Linked In profile but not completely updated. He reads blogs but never comments on them. He watches YouTube but never rates the videos. He absorbs.

2. The Engager: He is active on Twitter and Facebook and engages his followers and friends with experiences, opinions and interesting links. He realizes that Twitter is not just about making friends or gaining followeres, but about networking. Social networks are a great source of  up to date information for him.  He does not like too many conversations (@replies) on Twitter but retweets often. He probably even has automated ways of updating his status with feeds he reads, or music he listens to. He is active on Facebook and has his Facebook and Twitter statuses synced. He does not tweet pictures of himself all the time except for something nice he may have seen. He controls his Facebook privacy settings to selectively display his information/photos/opinions to his known friends’ circle or acquaintances. He may even have a personal social network of real known friends and a public one of people he has met online. He has a blog but updates it infrequently. He leverages the networking aspect of social networks, absorbs a lot, contributes moderately and at the same time protects himself from giving away every bit of his life to the hands of advertisers.

3. The Omnipresent: He is willing to lay his life in a platter out in the open. Privacy is definitely not a social norm for him.  His status updates on Facebook and Twitter are frequently accompanied by photos and videos of himself and his environment. He is a great conversationalist and responds to almost everything directed at him. If he eats at a restaurant, he Yelps. If he reads something interesting he Diggs it. If he does something, anything, of course he tweets and blogs about it. If he even plans/intends to do something, he Plancasts. He reviews and rates religiously, a true contributor. He syncs his credit card transactions with Blippy and doesn’t hesitate to tell the world what he spent where, how and when. Every time he goes to a place, a restaurant, a grocery store, gym, work, bar ..anywhere he checks in to FourSquare thereby revealing his location so his friends can find him.  If you track his life with the sequence of his updates you can probably figure out when he took a restroom break (or maybe there is an app for that too). If you Google him he is omnipresent, in time, in place, in deeds.

How socially private do you think you are?

Update your Netflix queue anywhere, anytime using Twitter

Problem: Do you often see movie trailers on YouTube or in a movie theater and wish you could update your Netflix queue with it instantly, before you forget the name of the movie? Or while conversing with friends you may hear of a good movie or read about one online and wish you could put that on your Netflix queue then and there? The common ways to do that today would be to make a note somewhere and then manually go to the Netflix site and update your queue.  But that’s so 2000!

Solution: After doing some searches I came across this super cool Twitter app that lets you tweet to add a movie to your Netflix queue. Its called AddNetflix.  Follow the instructions on that site to synch your Twitter and Netflix accounts one time and then all you have to do is send a direct message to addnetflix on Twitter with the name of the movie. For example, d addnetflix changeling #top will add the movie Changeling to the top of your Netflix queue.

Now let’s say you are at a movie theater watching a trailer, all you need to do is use SMS or a Twitter app to send a direct message to addnetflix with that movie name.

Say you are watching a trailer on YouTube, click on the Twitter link right below the video. It will open up your Twitter homepage and you can enter d addnetflix followed by the name of the movie and click the post button and that will do the same. Alternatively if you use browser plugins to tweet like Twitterbar, the process is simpler. You just enter d addnetflix <movie name> –post in your browser’s address bar and your Netflix queue will get updated. You could do the same with Tweetymail,  another very simple way to tweet.

Thanks to APIs and the wonderful developers who leverage these APIs to develop these apps, life becomes simpler

Uploading photos from Picasa to Facebook with one click

Isn’t it a pain to upload pics to Picasa once and then to Facebook? Thanks to some cool developers there is an app to do that for you in one click. You need to install a plugin.

Go to PicasaUploader

Click the big black button on the page to launch Picasa and install the plugin.

In the list that pops up, select the new “Facebook” button and click “Add” to place it in the button tray.

You will see the Facebook button on the menu at the bottom

Now select any photo(s) and click the newly added Facebook button and the app will upload your photos from Picasa directly to Facebook. You will of course have to enter your facebook credentials when uploading

Once uploaded, it will open your Facebook album in a browser and ask you if you approve the photos uploaded by that app. Select all or the ones you want to approve and click the Approve Selected Photos button at the bottom.

That’s it. Done! Happy Uploading.