Advocate's Studio

Email. Twitter. Facebook. Chat. These are just four of the major message sources on the Web these days. If you have a few friends and professional contacts, the messages really start to pile up. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to aggregate all of your messages and most of your social contact in one place?

You can functionally achieve message aggregation using Gmail as your master inbox, but this solution cannot touch the flash and ease of Threadsy (link here). Threadsy is  another social web application, but its focus is on managing your messages across services. Threadsy combines Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, MobileMe, Yahoo Mail, and other IMAP accounts, and popular chat formats. Being able to view them all in one locale is cool enough, but Threadsy takes it one step futher by allowing you to reply, archive, delete and manipulate your messages and set status posts like you would in each application.

As you can see above, the window is split, with messages showing in the left-hand window, and status updates (tweets, etc.) in the right-hand window. Threadsy also incorporates social information into your meta-inbox – simply click on a user’s profile and see their bio, photos and other publicly available information. Gives it a bit of a Xobni or Rapportive touch to your inbox.

Everything is click-able and expandable. Of course, it pulled my art blog handle, rather than my legal tech blog handle for the bio – not sure how to fix that yet.

Several months ago, I got an invite to Threadsy’s private beta and I really liked what I saw. I ultimately gave up on using it on a daily basis because it seemed to bog down my browser when I left it open. Threadsy has just become public and is sporting an even slicker image. So far, it seems to be performing more smoothly than before. I am committed to giving it another try – any tool that’s free and boosts my efficiency will find itself at the top of my tool belt!

Check out Threadsy – would love to know what you think about it.

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Some people like to fly by the seat of their pants. Others like to map every detail of their day and keep track of all matters through a macro-lens. For this latter group, there is 1DayLater.

1DayLater (link here) is more than a simple task manager. The app combines task tracking with value monitoring. Do you need to keep track of how much time you invest, how much money you spend or how much distance you travel while completing your tasks? Then 1DayLater may be your app.

This three-way marriage of task, time and money is a winner in itself, but 1DayLater improves the mix with a fantastically simple graphic interface and the ability to morph your data into beautiful visual representations and charts. The data entry page is to-the-point, with a log-in and actvitity list. You enter the project / client, and assign a value to the task. Value can be time, money or distance (the latter for traveling tasks, obviously). You can also notate the activity entry for greater detail. Clicking “go” adds the activity to your list.

Think of 1DayLater as a diary on steroids – if you religiously log your tasks and assign values, you can then obtain a powerful analytical tool for measuring your efforts. Once there are sufficient entries, you can “analyze” your data via 1DayLater’s nice charting features. You can even export your information to an Excel spreadsheet. There are tools for invoicing and supporting mileage claims as well.

The basic package is free and includes:

Unlimited projects and clients

Powerful search of your history

Basic visualisations

3rd party apps

OAuth password security

The next level is a paid package that works out to $7.50 per month or $60 per year and includes:

…all the free features plus

Export your data to spreadsheet

Generate invoices for projects & clients

Generate mileage claims

Guaranteed customer support

There is a corporate level for the application as well, and the 1DayLater team promises it will work with your IT people to modify the product to meet your needs and integrate with your systems.

Mobile apps are being developed right now, and the site advises that apps should be available for iPhone, Blackberry and Android this month. Not sure if they hit that target – only have a couple days left. You can still reach it on your mobile browser and desktop while you are waiting for your dedicated mobile version.

1DayLater: your life in chart form!

Hat tip to Free and Useful Online Resources for Designers and Developers.

It was bound to happen. That venerable tome that is frequently offered as a gift to 1L’s everywhere is now making its iPad debut! West’s Legal Current blog announced the introduction of Black’s Law Dictionary for iPad yesterday (link here).

Other than a bigger screen view and book-like imaging, it does not appear to offer much beyond the iPhone / iPod Touch version introduced about a year ago and discussed in the Studio (link here). But, if you are a lawyer on an iPad and are looking to expand your uses of the device, you may be interested in this $49.95 application.

Interestingly, the print version is already up to the Ninth Edition, while the iPad version lags behind at the Eighth Edition. The sacrifices we make for technology.

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Seems anything can be the subject of scientific study. “Augmented social cognition” researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center are groping for automated ways to cull the “meaning” behind tweets, per MIT’s Technology Review (link here).

The problem: users want to be able to scan a timeline to get the gist of what is going on without having to read every single tweet. This is a real problem when you have more than a 100 follows.

A portion of the study has been devoted to developing a recommendation system, not dissimilar to my6sense, which determines which tweets are most relevant to a user based on that user’s interaction with various tweets and with other users.

Borrowing imagery from a real-world stream and it’s eddies, the Eddie project is also working a “topic browser”, a machine aided inquiry into a Twitter stream that should enable the viewer to get more than simply the keywords; to reach the actual “gist” of the stream.

The topic search aspect is more problematic to implement in that natural language searches apparently rely generally on more text than the 140 character space limit allows. Additionally, there is simply such a vast amount information that it becomes logistically difficult to parse.

The method the research team has developed for dealing with these challenges is to treat a tweet like a search query. Tweets are filtered by removing unnecessary terms (like “RT”). Then the significant terms are pulled using the algorithm, and then run through a search engine, in this case Yahoo’s Build your Own Search Service interface.

In essence, tweets are matched with search results, allowing for a “best guess” as to what the tweet means. Given, however, that the major search engines are now indexing tweets, there is a real possibility that the tweet topic browser could return search results that mirror the original tweet.

The researchers anticipate that the topic browser may be online for live testing this summer. I look forward to playing around with this interesting combination of tweets and search in the pursuit of Twitter-meaning.

Hat tip to Resource Shelf

Check out these  free regulations trackers at RegInfo.gov and Regulations.gov. RegInfo.gov provides reliable, transparent information about regulations under development to enable the public to participate effectively in the regulatory process. It is produced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and the General Services Administration (GSA), Regulatory Information Service Center (RISC). What is cool is that it tracks administrative steps and processes that might be outside the Federal Register publication process. See what is coming down the pipeline in the Federal administrative process, complete with easy-to-read charts, scrolling news feed, regulatory review highlights, and the Unified Agenda and Regulatory Plan data.

Regulations.gov offers an online source for regulations from over 300 federal agencies. On the site you can:

Search for a regulation such as a proposed rule, final rule or Federal Register (FR) notice

Submit a comment on a regulation or on another comment

Submit an application, petition or adjudication document

Sign up for e-mail alerts about a specific regulation

Quickly access regulations that are popular, newly posted or closing soon-directly from the homepage

Subscribe to RSS feeds by agency of newly posted FR notices

Regulations.gov is designed with the goal of increasing access to and participation in regulations as they develop and related documents as well as promoting more efficient and effective rulemaking via public involvement. Comment on proposed rules and review the comments of others. All hail, public discourse!

Hat tip to Peggy Garvin at LLRX.

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