Thing 31. More Twitter

Whew. This Thing is exhausting--so much content. I have to give credit to the Thing folks on this one: you worked awfully hard putting the topic together. And that there is so much to deal with regarding Twitter is interesting in itself; from reading the blogs just a few months ago, the application seemed dead in the water. Now, for some reason Twitter is back and incredibly popular, too.

Still, it's not so popular with me. Sorry--I still just don't see the need for microblogging. In previous posts I explained my reason. I also went into what I considered some plausible functions that Twitter could accomplish. So, 'nough said.

Anyway, since this was is a post about further applications/widgets/add-ons for Twitter, I tried some out:
(Good)
Power Twitter-pretty cool. It's nice to get images and kind of stuff on my Twitter page.
BigTweet--like this one, too. It's nice to be able to post a tweet from my taskbar.

(Not so good)
Foxy- and TwittyTunes--couldn't get 'em to run on my Twitter page. I'll spend some more time on it later.

Later on, I'll work with some Greasemonkey scripts for Twitter. That should be interesting. Now, if I could find some use for Twitter...

Thing 30. More RSS and Delicious

I use Bloglines to keep track of my blogs. I group them into folders, some for professional activities like libraries and art/music, others into topics in which I'm interested, such as politics. And of course, there's a few subjects that cross over, like technology. I also set up a number of library-type feeds using Google Reader, just to try a different aggregator. It works fine. Better, sometimes, than Bloglines, which tends to go down from time to time. But then I got tired of moving all those feeds over and just decided to stay with Bloglines.

Delicious, I use a lot, but not those 2.0 bell and whistles discussed in Thing that could be used to share my stuff, like that Delicious badge. The reason why: I save those items for my own use and organize them into bundles to make them easy to recover. But I don't want other folks looking at them. Selfish, of me, huh?

For me, Delicious is a tool for maintaining and organizing links to websites useful or interesting to me, not a means of investigating what others have done. There's a lot of crap on the internet; I don't need yet another way of finding it.

Thing 29. Google Tools

I used Google Alerts as an experiment, seeking more information about one of the topics in which I'm interested, neoliberalism and libraries. (My other blog, In a Chilly Place, is centered on this topic, if you're interested.) The topic is not one that I figured would generate much content, and it hasn't. I've gotten two hits in a week. So, I think I'll change the alert just to neoliberalism and see what happens. I might be overwhelmed with too much stuff, but we'll see. In any case, I had no problem using Google Alerts, and think the application could be quite useful for gathering current info for research projects, etc.

The other tool I used is Google Sites. I just wanted to set up a simple website for family information. The usual: what's happening with the us, the kids, the pets, some images, stuff for the rest of the clan to enjoy. So far I haven't added any pages to the first, but I'll get around to it. Here's a link to it, Jeff's World (I know, dumb title.) Anybody or group wanting a simple website could use Google Sites; the app. makes it easy to create a site and add to it.

Thing 28. Customized home pages

I've used iGoogle for a while, and found it pretty useful. The design is easy to style, theme-wise, and work with. Adding content, such as widgets, is a piece of cake. So far, I've stuck on a calendar, a chat box, a to-do list, weather info, a SI link, a YouTube search, Flickr and a news feed. Too much, actually, but it's fun to have all that stuff. Some for the office, some for fun. It works for me.

The only trouble I've really had is with Google calendar. It takes a while to load and is often cumbersome when it comes to adding an event. In addition, if you open the darn thing, often you can't get out again--there's no link to return to your iGoogle page.

I can really see the value of such a customized page for the area in which I work in at the library. As each area (formerly a department) has specialized content, having a page to reflect this would be pretty nifty. For example, we could add links to finding aides, create a vid and make it available via YouTube, add some Flickr images, link to dbs and the catalog. Of course, there's been talk of this for years, but not much has ever been done. iGoogle, Pageflakes, etc., would makes the task a lot easier.