March 11, 2010, Vol. 4, Issue 4

To quote George, Ringo, John, and Paul, “it’s been a long, cold lonely winter.” Well, cold. Not really lonely. We’ve been busy creating and writing and researching and…what a mess we’ve made of the place! In particular, I’m talking about my computer.

It’s Spring in ten – count ‘em – ten days.

So there’s no time like the present to start cleaning up some of that unsightly mess….

I don’t know about your Twitter, but mine ain’t pretty

Try The Twit Cleaner. @SIDawson wrote The Twit Cleaner because he got sick of all the garbage on Twitter. Not just the spammers, but people who posted nothing but links all day every day, people who never replied when he messaged them, and so on.

When you sign in, it gets your following list, then analyzes the profiles and tweets of every single one of those people, looking for certain patterns of behavior (people not talking, being over repetitive, common spam tactics, posting the same links repeatedly, etc).

It’s then up to you to decide whom to save and whom to unfollow.

It’s empowering. (Okay, that is such an exaggeration. But it does feel good to clean house.)

Bookmarks but better

My BFF told me she migrated to the Google Chrome browser and she has never sounded happier. Well, there was that one time… But I digress…

I’m a big Delicious fan. It’s great with our team. Helps us share info. And for me, it helps on the road because I can always remember a keyword but I can’t always remember the site. Bet it happens to you, too. But I do want to speed up my browsing. And then, I found out that there is a Delicious extension that synchronizes bookmarks with Google Chrome. I have a huge stash of bookmarks on Delicious and couldn’t bear the thought of losing the easy access. Now, I can (gulp) leave Firefox behind and migrate. Change is hard, but as my mom always said, “It’s for the best, Dear.”

In this case, it’s true. Because the functionality is way cooler. You can (of course) tag from the browser, but you can synch with Google Bookmarks and search from Chrome’s OmniBar by just typing in letters related to the title, the tags, or most anything else you recorded.

I’m starting to get the gist of it

I wrote about Gist back in October. It’s a contact manager and a business intelligence tool that focuses on “blending how your contacts, connections, and all the associated content you share and they generate comes together for your use.”

I admit I started out slowly. But now it’s on my iPhone and my desktop and I’m diving a bit deeper. I can see the benefits for streamlining my contacts – which admittedly are totally out of control. My 2010 Spring Resolution is to make Gist work hard for me. Check it out. You’ll either be freaked out by putting all your passwords online or you’ll be super excited that your whole world will be visible from one vantage point. I was in the former, now in the latter. What about you?

More is coming…

I’ll be writing more about how to get back in shape for Spring in two weeks. Meantime, if you know of great ideas for organzing your computer and your online life so you can focus on the tasks at hand (For me, research!), email me. Please! I’ll be waiting here.