Read it later digest

I often find myself doing triage on online content either out of Google Reader or Twitter, and the two services I use to manage my deferred content are Instapaper and Read It Later. I primarily use instapaper for long form content and articles without many graphics (e.g. from The Atlantic). For me, Instapaper saves content for when I purposefully take time to sit down and read. On the other hand, I use Read It Later on a daily basis for all the short web content, videos I want to watch later but not send to Boxee, and things I should do while I am on another machine.

Due to the volume of content I save to Read It Later it’s often hard to find what I want to read. The article(s) I’m looking for always seem to be buried in different places in my list. A while ago I started playing with the beta version of Read It Later Digest, the developers answer for users with problems like mine. Digest is a web-based reading tool which automatically categorizes links you’ve saved into topics. From the site, you can customize your topics and read within each topic. Moreover, the site allows one to access the content without leaving the digest page in a text only version which is a huge time saver.

Digest allows me to read content in a slimmed down formant very quickly. If I want to check out what’s going on in the sailing world, I just head over to my sailing topic. If I want to read through all the posts from the NYT Deal Book blog I saved out of reader this morning I just visit that topic. Read it later digest has significantly improved my efficiency and enjoyment of reading all the links I’ve saved. I’m really excited to see how Nate, the developer, will incorporate Digest into the iPhone/iPad version.

Reducing the content I consume for more simple living

Lately through my “personal metadata experiment” I have been noticing I am spending a lot of time-consuming content that I feel I have a NEED to consume. The majority of this content is news (via google reader and email alerts), twitter, and podcasts. While I really do love consuming this content it take a lot of time out of my day, furthermore, it is a never-ending fire hose of data. As a result, I’m always left feeling like there is more data that I NEED to consume and it ends up taking time away from other tasks and interactions I would rather be doing.

So this weekend I have been going through my google reader list, newsletters, and people I am following on Twitter and unsubscribing from everything that feel I don’t NEED to read or follow. I’m going to keep a list of the feeds and people who I have unsubscribed from in case I find myself needing to add these sources back. Taking an approach of extreme cutting, and then adding back as need be. This is one step I am taking in an effort to simplify parts of my life and provide more time for productive tasks and to spend less time trying to “keep current”.

One thing that I am looking for are suggestions of highly refined, high quality, and low volume RSS feeds you enjoy consuming.

My favorite TED talk

Keith Ferrazzi tweeted his favorite TED clip and asked others which one is their favorite. As you may know, I like many TED clips and post some of them on this blog. Keith’s favorite was Al Gore’s on climate change which instantly reminded me of the TED talk I like the most; John Doerr’s talk on climate change and Genentech. I replied back (2) with this talk, but I decided to take a few minutes and re-watch it and post it here as well.

JMBlogUpdate Twitter account update

Recently I started adding services that are being pushed to my @JMBlogUpdate twitter account. Historically this account has been primarily used to push new posts from this blog.  Recently I’ve added my Google Reader Share feed (via reader2twitter) and Delicious feed (via twitterfeed). I’ll see how permanent this is, but for now I figure it’s a good way to distribute the articles/ websites that I think others may enjoy but don’t necessarily rise to the level to distribute on my primary twitter feed. If you’re interested in checking out this feed follow @JMBlogUpdate or follow the RSS feed and let me know if you think pushing these feeds is worthwhile.

Twitter overload?

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a big twitter user. Previously, I’ve tried to find the perfect twitter client for me (worked only so well). However, recently I’ve started to feel the brunt of twitter (coupled with Google Reader) overload. I follow a good number of people and do try to read everything that comes across, which I feel is part of the problem I’m now facing. I’ve being coming around to the idea that twitter is a lot about stepping into the stream and then back out, consuming what you want while in the stream and ignoring what happens when not.

As a result, earlier this week I started to pair back on some of the people (in many cases bots) that I followed. For most of these twitter feeds I simply moved them from my twitter timeline and into Google reader as RSS feeds. So far, it’s been an enjoyable experience. Most of the users I transitioned were feeds or users who posted a lot of links; being able to consuming these links during my RSS time seems more efficient.

Now I’m left with one more issue to tackle, within my twitter stream there people I follow that I would prefer to see all tweets from, or at least the majority of them, even for the periods that I am “out of the stream”. Sure, I could add these to SMS notifications but I really hate twitter over SMS. The iPhone handles SMS poorly and I already get too many notifications on my iPhone. So I’m looking for an alternative to SMS for a subset of the people I follow.

I’ve considered hiring a programmer to modify the email twitter client that I had made to only email me tweets from select users in my feed. I like this idea; it allows me to continue to manage just one list of friends and the ability to read all the tweets no matter how long I am out of the stream. The downsides: 1) cost, hiring a programmer=$, 2) since I spend a lot of time in my main stream there’s the risk too many emails will pile up and go unmanaged from the time I’m in the stream and I’ll end up ignoring these emails during the times I anticipated using the system.

At this point I am going to try and setup an additional twitter account to follow this subset of people and launch that timeline when need be. The downside is maintaining two accounts and the potential confusion other people may have with the situation (so if you get followed by my second account you knows what’s up). The advantage being it should take quite a while for 200 tweets (the upper limit for most twitter clients to pull) to cycle through this timeline.

So I’m looking for alternative and am open to any suggestions, please let me know if you have any thoughts.

Update on TweetDeck syncing

Some of the developers from TweedDeck got in touch with me after my last post regarding my issues on the group sync functionality. In good form they were able to get an updated version of TweetDeck (0.26.4) out quickly and, thus far after testing that version for a wile it appears the sync feature is working! Thanks TweetDeck!

There are a few things to note regarding the sync function, which I have been told they are working to speed up. First, group members really only sync every 20 minutes, so you should run an instance for at least 20 minutes to make sure the changes get pushed to the server. Second, when you launch TweetDeck on a second machine it appears when the application sync the new group list the users will not actually be filtered until a NEW tweet is recenved from that user, at that point prior loaded tweets from that user will be properly filtered.

All together, a good update to TweetDeck and I am glad to see them responding so quickly to bugs!.

Tweetdeck Syncing Sucks

Like many people I spend a fair bit of time everyday using twitter from multiple computers, I basically have 4 points 1) work PC 2) Home Mac 3) Mac laptop and 4) iPhone. As I’ve discussed in prior posts here and here, the biggest problem I have with twitter clients today is the inability to filter users into groups and have those same groups accessible from all my access points. As a general rule I do my best to read most all tweets from the people that I follow, as a result putting people into group makes this process more efficient. I have an email system that satisfied this but for other reasons (which I am in the process of writing a sort of postmortem on). When I heard the latest version of Tweetdeck provided syncing of groups and there members across all platforms in conjunction with the launch of their iPhone application I honestly thought tweetdeck would solve my issues. In nearly a week of testing I have found the latest version of tweetdeck, 0.26.2, to absolutely suck at syncing. And I think I will avoid tweetdeck until they fix these features as I have sunk hours into trying to get these issues resolved and the tweetdeck staff has been absolutely unresponsive on twitter, via email, via blog comment responses, or their feedback forum.

Development of my new “favorite” Twitter client

A few weeks ago I posted about looking for the optimal Twitter.com client for my needs. Ideally, looking for something that will allow me access across platforms and machines, enable me to never miss a tweet (unless i want to) and always know where I left off. My initial idea was an web service that would email each tweet in my timeline, replies, etc. Not being a programmer I found someone to actually build a single user proof of concept. The web app was completed a few weeks ago and I have been using that as my sole Twitter client since then. I would have posted earlier but my work schedule had me trekking around the country, which was actually a perfect time to be testing out such a system in addition to the holidays. Being disconnected for the long transcon flights and spending all day in meeting would preclude anyone from keeping up on Twitter, so it was a perfect period to be testing.

In search of the perfect Twitter client for my PC – looking for feedback

If you don’t know already I am a really big fan of Twitter, for many reasons I love twitter for keeping in touch with friends, discussing trading strategies, and finding new friends. It’s a great tool that has become a cornerstone of my communications and daily life. In fact I am likely on Twitter in someway more often than any other tool or service.

Right now I am in search of the *perfect* Twitter client.