Will Google Wave redefine Email and Web Communication?
May1
I’ve just received an RSS feed through from Mashable about an upcoming tool called Google Wave, a new in-browser communication and collaboration tool that is already being hailed by some as the next big thing for the web.
There is very little in the way of actual material to share but there are a few screen grabs available and the Google Wave website, where you can leave your email address to be notified when the keynote presentation video is uploaded (but not until later this year it would seem).
From the pictures, it has the same overall look and feel of the Gmail interface but focuses much more on your contacts and connectivity rather than what’s being sent. From what I can gather, it’s been designed as a way to unify your online experience, so you won’t need to fire up your email, blog, twitter or IM accounts indvidually; instead you all have it under one roof. Also one cool little feature I like is the ability to drop and drag images from your desktop to share, rather than uploading them all the time.
Looks pretty cool to me, what do you think? Just another fad tool that will be forgotten 12 months after launch or is this the next Twitter?
How to set up Twitterfeed
May2
At the start of the month I wrote this post as I wanted to better manage my Twitter / Blog postings and bring the two together / Twitterfeed was good, back in the good old days when I was using Blogger. Now, for some reason, The Twitterfeed site occasionally goes down so you might not be able to log into the site and set up you own account. I wanted to revisit this site as this was one of my most popular postings…
Last week I wrote a post on a clever way to upload your blog posts directly to Twitter without having to do it manually. I originally set the system up using RSS feeds – which I outlined here…
I have however, found and even better and much more straightforward way of doing this – by using Twitterfeed.
Twitterfeed in essence scans your blog at regular intervals (hourly or daily) and then, in a similar fashion to RSS, uploads a Tweet + tiny url of the post embedded within – leaving you to go off and do something else.
It’s a very easy system to set up (put it this way, I managed to do it while having one eye on The Two Towers on the tube) and before you know it, you’ll be tweeting remotely like the best of them!
There are two things to watch out for however:
1. The Twitterfeed home page, found here, is very temperamental and occasional doesn’t work
2. It will make life so much easier if you have your Open ID to hand before you start the process (I had to go away and then set one up halfway through the Twitterfeed set up)
So there you have it – Twitterfeed, a really effective way of merging your blogging and twitter worlds.
Any questions, give me a shout – you can follow me on Twitter through the link on the left
RSS Feeds to Twitter
Apr3
Been thinking for a while now as to how I can get by blog posts sent direct to my Twitter account – and here’s how!
Found a really easy to use little tool called RSS to Twitter.
Here’s a screen grab of the site – which can be found here
Just what is RSS?
Mar0
Just what is RSS?
We had a monthly get together at work recently and one of the topics that came up in conversation was ”RSS – does everybody know what this is?” I have to say I didn’t really understand it so took it upon myself to piece together exactly what this revolutionary technology is all about.
RSS is a technologu that is being used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favourite websites. Perhaps as little as five years ago (I’m sure someone will disagree with me but…) the only real way of keeping track of updates on a website you liked meant you had to bookmark that site and manually return to the site on a regular basis to see what had been updated.
The problems with bookmarking is that you had to do all the work. The site was updated by whoever built it in the first place but once done, you had no idea that there were any changes. It is very easy to miss information even when checking bookmarks.
You end up seeing the same information over and over again on sites that weren’t update very often. Where does RSS come in? RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ Many people describe it as a ‘news feed’ that you subscribe to.
Think of it in terms of a magazine – a magazine that is delivered to you periodically but instead of being posted to you once a month, it is delivered to your RSS reader, every time your favourite website is updated. I’ve also managed to track down a brief video from videojug which explains the who process – with lots of pictures and charts!
RSS In Plain English