Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

I don’t think I’ve ever written about something in two blogs at once, but this is just so stupid, that I have to share it twice. In short, the founder of Mikogo, Mark Zondler, has been threatened by Mannheim city; if he doesn’t give up his Twitter username, http://twitter.com/mannheim, they will sue him for it.

My first reaction was, what the hell are they thinking! This was also my second and third reactions, and I’m still counting, the stupidity of this is just overwhelming. Ok, his name is Zondler, not Mannheim, but will this mean we can only use names which are our own, in the future? Will everyone have to change their names to daniel_123 and daniel_887?

When I started registering domain names I really wanted pataki.com instead of danielpataki.com, so I could have some better email addresses, maybe for my family as well. As it turns out, that domain is for sale, but i doubt it is held by someone name Pataki. Could I sue him for this? I also really wanted Webtastique.com (instead of net), so if I quickly have a baby and give him (or her, maybe this is a girl’s name) this name, can I finally sue this person for the domain? His name probably isn’t Johnny Webtastique, so he shouldn’t have been allowed to register it, I think jail time will be necessary for this evil person.

While I don’t actually think there will be a lawsuit because this is just an idle threat in the hope he’ll give up his name, the arrogance of the city is astounding and infuriating. How do governments expect people to behave in civilized fashion, if their own cities act with the arrogance and pompousness of a spoiled 9 year old girl?

Read more about this on one of the Mikogo blog posts, and let us know about your thoughts on this issue, do you think Mannheim (the city) would stand a chance in this lawsuit?

Twitter is a fun tool to use and can be used productively and efficiently in a business too. I found some cool extra tools for this microblogging platform on Make Use Of, not all of them really productive, but we have to have some fun now and again!

If you want to analyze your Twitter feed, take a look at some in depth stats, find some follow suggests you’ll want to take a look at the post Jimmy wrote. There are also some good tips on getting more followers and finding out what’s hot in the “Twittersphere”. Most of these tools for me are of the “try – have fun – forget” type but some, like Xefer show data in such a cool way I may actually just use it as a fun tracking tool for myself.

If you’d like some more Twitter stuff take a look at how to save characters using URL shortening services, and how to create a personal productivity tool using Twitter and Wordpress.  There are also some other great articles on Make Use Of about Twitter, don’t be afraid to perform a search!

Twitter is one of the best tools for letting the world know what you’re doing at the moment and Wordpress is one of the most flexible and free blogging systems today. Combining the two you can create one of the most powerful organization systems, all this for free!

Preparations

You will need three things to get going with this system. First of all, you need to sign up for a Twitter account which will take you the best of 3 minutes. If you already have a username I recommend creating another one for this specific task. Since you are using this to organize and manage yourself, you might be sharing some stuff you don’t want to.

Second of all you will need a domain and an installed Wordpress blog. For those of you who already have one of these this is a simple step (since no work needs to be done), but for those of you who don’t this could take some time. If you don’t already have hosting please consider Bluehost, I use it for all my domains and if you sign up using my link I get some money which goes a long way for supporting Hack Your Day and my other sites. You will also need to install Wordpress, take a look at their site, they have excellent documentation. If you need help there, my new service, Blogtastique will install the blog and set up the plugin (see next paragraph) for you for free.

Last, but not least, you will need the Twitter Tools plugin by Alex King. This is the tool that will do the grunt of the work, capable of creating tweets from your posts or posts from your tweets, and adding all sorts of functionality on top.

The productivity method

The idea I had which sets the basis for this method is that I wanted a way to keep track of myself, of what I do, what I waste time on and so on, and also a way to easily browse, create statistics and so on. The first part was a given once I started to use Twitter. I can very simply write down what I’m doing, spending no more than 5 seconds on it between tasks. The second part proved a bit of a challenge. Twitter has a history, but nothing really powerful that can give you advanced filter functionality and so on. However, Alex King’s plugin and Wordpress give you excellent ways to manage yourself and get useful information from your day.

The workflow

The workflow defines what you do and how you do it, so please view this as my take, my method, feel free to deviate, explore and share. Basically, when you work, all you need to do is send a quick tweet about what you are doing. “doing marketing presentation”, “writing gHacks post”, etc are good examples, and as you will see the method works best if you document each and every action you do. You can use the Twitter website, but it may be more productive if you use a desktop tool, such as Twhirl, which is a handy Adobe Air application for quick desktop twittering.

You can stop there if you wish, but there is a lot more you can do. Right now you can’t add tags and categories, so what I do is go through all my posts the next day and give them tags, categories and additional notes if I have any more thoughts. Since I opted for the daily summary, I can quickly go through where I need to add tags, delete and so on.

Presentation

That’s basically all there is to the workflow, the other parts of this method just deal with the data presentation. I found a great Twitter-like theme named Bluebird for the blog and I have modified it to show data I need, take a look at my personal organizer. It will only be public for a few days, so hurry!

The great thing about this method is that not only does it give you a great way to present your daily log, but it also enables you to create a customized start page just for you. You can use Wordpress pages like you would on Netvibes and you can use the sidebar for quick links to your favorite site.

Of course your main concern will be presenting your actual tweets. Since the tweet is partially contained in the title and fully in the body, I have removed the titles, and I now only show the tweets, and the dates. There are endless options to modify the look and data volume you show, all you need is a little practice with Wordpress.

Further uses

There are numerous way you can use this method for personal organization. You can organize tasks as well as your activity log, because you can always go and edit the posts later on to add stuff, mark them as done, and so on.

You can also create an email log, so you won’t have to find individual emails you’ve answered for example. Just type “answered John’s email”, or simply “answered email” and you’ll find the answer without actually having to remember more than that.

If you play a lot of darts, poker, pool, or anything else competitive, you can log your progress and then search through it quickly and easily. You can also display results for March, or any other time period.