Skip to main content

Tweetdeck could be my Control Panel of life

For the past week, I've used Tweetdeck to catch up on Twitter feeds at the end of the day. I follow only a handful of people so I get more quality then quantity out of Twitter, which is okay by me.

Tweetdeck lets me quickly scan my Friends twits, but also quickly see if I have replies or Direct Messages. More useful is the panels I can have for search. I can easily see new Twits from everyone, not just friends on topics of interest.

Yesterday, Google Voice stopped working with Gizmo5. Since I use Chad Smith's Google Voice Firefox Add to easily dial numbers from my work's CRM, that was a hassle. I spent the days channeling outgoing work calls to another phone, but I missed being able to use my headphones with Gizmo.

There was an active thread on the Google Voice Help Forum, but as the day wore on, no responses suggested Google Employees may not have seen the post and knew of the problem.

Finally, I had the bright idea of twitting @googlevoice and also the Twitter addresses of two Google employees I thought might be connected with Google Voice.

I fired up Tweetdeck, and hid all columns to avoid work distraction except for a search column I set up to monitor tweets to/from those accounts.

Emails were coming in all day from the thread on the help forum too. So it occurred to me, why couldn't I have the RSS feed from the help discussion come into a panel on Tweetdeck? That way I could have an entire alert panel for the ongoing issue.

Taking it further, why not, as Alex Chriss on the Tech Spheres blog suggests, have the ability to have your OPLM file of all your RSS subscriptions coming to a column in Tweetdeck? Genius.

But why stop there?

Many of us use web based email today. Have Tweetdeck have a column listing emails that are waiting in your inbox.

Or a way to have incoming IM's, missed VoIP calls, text messages, new items in my Evernote Inbox, my Delicious box, all show up?

Tweetdesk supports Twitter by letting you create twits and reply to them. It can add these other alerts without feeling the need to support the support functions to go along with them. If I see an email has come in, I can still go to my browser to reply to it.

And it would be nice if you could have everything in one combined column in chronological order, tweets, emails, rss items etc, maybe color coded. Or in multicolumn mode, select the kind of items in each column.

And maybe sound cues for incoming items with customizable sounds. Say silent for most, but a click or beep for an email or IM. And a siren for an email from an important client.

Tweetdeck is a good start. I want it to be the Control Panel for my life.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Notes Folder : My new note taking system

I'm in the process of moving to a new way to keep my notes. It would be best to make a separate post on my long time notetaking app, Evernote, and how it now disappoints me.  Bottom line, I no longer trust the company behind Evernote since it was acquired. My first inclination was to finally look at alternatives. like Notion, Joplin, Obsidian, etc. I was not enamored with any of them, so I gritted my teeth and stayed with Evernote. The situation made me think about how I use Evernote. To keep up additional posts on this topic, search on the tag Notes Folder Updates : January 24, 2024 and in updates noted here. Most of the things I store are quick notes, lists, online receipts for online bills, that sort of thing; kind of an online file cabinet if you will. If I were a doctoral student though I could see storing PDFs of papers and research materials.  If were working on a large project, then plans, communications etc. would all be there. Back when I began using Evernote way b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Recording your own notes with Google Voice

Note :   April 2016:  Frankly I don't know if this works anymore.  It is 7 years old. I stopped using this when Google Now became useful on my phone, and I could dictate reminders using it. I found a way a while ago to use Google Voice to record a personal note, transcribe it, and email it to me. A recent Lifehacker post "Five Things We'd Like to See in Google Voice" lists that need as their #5 request, so I realized what I'd figured out is not common knowledge. In GV's Contacts, create a Group "Special Transcription" To avoid listening to my standard voice mail when I call, I recorded a short voice mail greeting for this group simply saying "Record note now" I added a contact with my own cell phone number as the only number, and made it the sole member of this group. In GV's phone settings, I edited the settings for my cell phone. In the section "Direct access to voicemail when calling your Google number from th...
62 comments
Read more

Ten Years of Evernote

This blog post was set to publish exactly as the day begins on Tuesday, July 31, 2018. That is ten years to the day after my first Evernote  post. With my second note, I was already getting down to business; recording the agreement I'd come to on the phone on a minor business matter. My affection for Evernote has not dimmed since that day ten years ago. Since then, I've accumulated about 7.8 new notes a day. Ironically, I have needed to pull up only a few notes a year. Yet, when I need them, I need them badly and am glad to have Evernote all over again. My philosophy of what to capture is simple : If you encounter something you might remotely want to see again, it goes into Evernote. from a blog post June 1, 2015 I've written here about Evernote than any other topic.  Even wrote a now horribly out-of-date book. Don't get me wrong. If something better comes along that imports my Evernote notes well, I can be enticed to move.  But in t...
Post a Comment
Read more