I have been mucking around with some social media aggregation sites and my most recent venture is FriendFeed, which I’ve seen around the web and have known about it for a while, but never really got around to trying it. Well, I managed to get there, and here’s what I found.

What’s most striking about FriendFeed is the design, and perhaps this is why I might choose it above others (plus it supports the most sites). FriendFeed has no style. I don’t mean it is distasteful, but it has no style as in it has a header and then you just get a list on a white background. This is a refreshing design, catering to the puritan needs in us. I see this as an absolute positive aspect of the site, I very much enjoy the clean form, allowing me to concentrate on content instead.

Sites supported are also wide and varied, from obvious ones like Youtube and StumbleUpon to smaller sites like Furl and Tipjoy. There is also a lot of variation, for example Library Thing is supported, which is a social Book catalog and discovery tool, but you can also add music sites like Last.fm, and many others, totaling up to 41 great services.

Bloggers will love FriendFeed because it not only allows you to add your blog, but other blogs where you write. You can specify blogs with multiple authors and only show the stories you wrote. Since I do most of my writing on other sites this is a great way for me to showcase this, previously I could only achieve this with a complicated but of php.

You can also create rooms for specific topics, groups and so on, creating and sharing content only relevant to that room. This is awesome for bloggers too to promote the topic of their blog, but also study groups, friends, and so on.

Overall I like FriendFeed a lot. I haven’t made my decision on the best one, but FriendFeed is currently at number 1. Simplicity and number of features make this service one of the easiest ones to use and with the ways you can display it on your blog, possible the most productive too.

I found a cool tool browsing Lifehacker today, called Desktop Teleporter. You will find it quite useful for cleaning up your desktop, which it is capable of doing on its own. Simply specify some criteria, and your files will automatically be moved to different folders based on this.

This is useful if you download a lot of files with Firefox, and for me the best way of doing this is to simply use my desktop as a repository. This can result in widespread chaos on my desktop, which is less than productive, and having an automatic routine that cleans it for me is a great help.

I highly recommend this to people with cluttered desktops, although I don’t use it myself because I am missing one feature which would be awesome. I would like to specify that the program should only move files off my desktop to specified folders which I haven’t opened in over 24 hours. The reason I use my desktop to download is that I view these files often for a while, but after that I just forget about them. It would be cool if there could be a time dimension to this all. I would also love for the app to be better looking, but that’s not of cardinal importance.

I was looking at some of my comments when I found a trackback to one of the funniest posts I’ve read recently, it makes fun of the term productivity Ninja, and I am linked to! This behavior can not be tolerated of course and the Ninja has bee dispatched to deal with this arch criminal, but until he gets there, take a look at the investigative report by The Growing Life.

In light of the current situation as I have said, I have contacted said authority, who is on his way to deal swift, nay, productive pain to the author, who should enjoy the limelight. While he can! Muahhahaha. I just wanted to correct some of the so called “facts” or observations he makes. Here’s the lowdown on the productivity ninja, or at least as much as his second line of command knows.

Bruce Lee is not the ninja

Bruce Lee is obviously not, and could never be a productivity Ninja. Have you ever seen him walking around with a Moleskine? For that matter, no one could ever see the productivity ninja. He is so productive at walking that you can not see him, since he enters his own dimension of productivitiveness, also called Dimension P.

Dave Navarro is not the Ninja

Again, misinterpreted facts. As a guitarist myself I am inclined to talk of him as one of the disciples training in the productivity dojo, he has some pretty cool guitars. Despite this, the P code does not allow sideburns like that to enter the realm of true productivity.

“In all seriousness, however, wouldn’t a real ninja shoot a dart at you with a note in it or write a message on your arm without you noticing it?”

Of course not! A real ninja would shoot emails right into your head, and retrieve the answer directly from the neurons in your gray matter. He has no need for conventional electronic equipment, although he does use Remember the Milk sometimes, this has something to do with being in his own dimension again.

The productivity ninja is a sexy women

I actually don’t know, but let’s hope that this is the case!

The productivity ninja doesn’t have much fun

You couldn’t be farther from the truth! He applies labels, manages his emails and comes up with new ways to use online applications all day! Imagine, no need to play squash, no Nintendo Wii and stupid guitars to tend to. The Ninja uses regular expression searches (or in his words, regex searches), he does mass replacement algorithms, and all sorts of fun stuff, why would you say otherwise?

“He Does Not Hang Out With the Productivity Easter Bunny or the Productivity Tooth Fairy”

Indeed, he does not. This would not be the Ninja way. He has been sighted with the productivity duck billed platypus and the productivity Santa Clause though.

The productivity ninja does not use Internet Explorer

Another misconception, the ninja does use Internet Explorer, or in his words, IE. He uses it a lot to point out flaws in the browser so he can bash it around. The ninja does not in fact “use” any browser in the common sense of the word. He has his own Ninja Browser, which was developed from P-particles and is made purely from productive energy.

The productivity ninja isn’t affected by dings

What? First of all I am inclined to ask a question containing one three lettered words, consisting of double-you, tee and eff. First of all, dings are one of the worst enemies of the man himself. Second of all, the productivity ninja isn’t affected by anything, only he affects everything. He’s a bit like Chuck Norris I guess.

Thanks you to Clay for his awesome post on The Growing Life.

StumbleUpon is a cool phenomenon on the web, it allows you to discover, or stumble upon, websites you like endlessly. People can “I like it” a page, which will get the page into the system, or just add another person who likes it. The page is also tagged, which serves as a basis for categorizing each webpage. Users can specify their interests and based upon that and the tags, pages similar to their interest will be served.

This results in two things. One is that one can have so much fun on the net, instead of every 1 out of 20 pages being appealing, the ration goes up to about 1 in 3 or better. This also means that a lot of people become less productive, you can spend hours on end just stumbling. This has led to a debate weather StumbleUpon is a friend or foe, a blessing or a curse.

I would like to make the case for StumbleUpon and I think I can make quite a good case too. First let me argue with some of the points made against. My biggest argument is that if you don’t have time but still spend hours in front of StumbleUpon that is hardly StumbleUpon’s fault is it? Just stop pressing the button for God’s sake! I don’t think smokers blame Marlboro or Coffee drinkers blame Nescafé for making coffee.

I also heard that people are starting to hate this service because it is used a lot for blog promotion and so on. Well I use it too, although I really only use it myself when I think I wrote a cool article. If you don’t like the fact that a page is stumbled, just use the thumbs down button. If the community agrees with you they will bury the story anyway. If you don’t agree with the community it doesn’t mean the community is right, but StumbleUpon is developed for the majority, not the minority.

Now some points for StumbleUpon’s good name. For people who write about anything on or off the web, this can be a great source of information. If you write about cars, just type cars as your interest and you will be served thousands and thousands of pages with the content you’re looking for. Many times these pages would be otherwise unfindable, since they may rank 399th on a Google search.

StumbleUpon also helps many upcoming bloggers by driving traffic to their site. If a Stumbler doesn’t like the site it means a 2 second detour, but some of those guys might like the page and keep viewing. This means a valuable new site for them and a valuable new reader for the blog too.

Also, personally I love StumbleUpon. I’ve probably found the funniest pages, I’ve laughed very hard thanks to SU, and I’ve found the most beautiful photography, the best music pages and the list could go on and on. To me StumbleUpon is like the small restaurant on the corner which can be found in every city. It looks like nothing special, one restaurant out of the thousands, but you go in and have one of the best meals of your life. StumbleUpon brings these pages closer to you, and it let’s you have a great time. If you can’t stop that just means SU is a great service, the fault lies with you.

If you’ve got multiple accounts there’s a really easy way to backup all your emails automatically as they are sent/received. If you have a gmail account it’s even easier, but it can be done with many services, and even email clients.

The whole idea is to route all your email addresses to one central account. You don’t have to use this to actually read the mail, but it can be used as an emergency backup, or just general storage of all your emails. I personally have gmail accounts and accounts hosted by Bluehost. I get regular emails to all my accounts, but I only need to view a few of them regularly, so those that I monitor daily I route to a central Gmail accounts. I also forward emails from ALL accounts to another Gmail account, which I just use to store my emails.

I started this about a year ago, and I only used it once, but it probably saved me about 2 weeks of work, so I guess it was all worth it. It may be hard to find stuff on this account as you may accumulate thousands of letter, but at least it will be there.

In Gmail you can simply use a forwarder rule to send all messages to another account, if you have an email address hosted by a company like Bluehost you will likely find options for forwarding there as well. You can also use apps like Outlook, although this is much more of a bother, since you actually have to send the emails manually while Gmail and other hosts will do the bulk of the work automatically. Perhaps another option would be to retrieve all your mail with Outlook or Thunderbird and use your data file in the same way as you would the central Gmail account.

This tip might not contribute to your productivity directly, but it will give you an increased sense of organization, and an extra backup option which you can forget about until you need it.

Stapling productivity just doesn’t get any better than this folks! This stapler doesn’t use metal staples, but the paper itself to join together your stuff. Apart from being highly environmentally friendly, it will save you money and time, since you will never have to buy staples again!

I seem to run out of staples at the worst possible times, although I don’t use them much at all these days. This contraption is a great novelty item too though, I’m probably ordering one this week just to play around with it.

If you need industrial office type stapling for 50 pages I recommend getting the usual high performance stapler, but for every day use, I would say up to 10 sheets, this is great. Such a great idea, such simplicity, I love it! If you like it too check out a video and links to buy on my new site, Organization & Planning, where I will be moving all the product stuff that used to be on Hack Your Day a while back.