Monthly Archives: August 2012

Aug 8 2012

Slices: A Great Twitter Management Tool

 

Yes, Twitter needs management, unless you follow fifty or fewer people. Yes, there are tons of Twitter management tools out there. But, like there are many different learning and processing styles, there are many different ways to consume information and one may work better for you personally than another.

 

Slices is another option for this purpose. Right now, it is a live app on iOS and Android, and a Web version is promised but is still in invite-only beta. I tried it out on iOS and it works beautifully. While the layout is pretty standard, it offers a Twitter directory for finding the best follows on Twitter, a “Live Events” filter which shows the live stream for the top news stories of the day, and Trending filters for your city, country or worldwide. What really is interesting is the “slices” themselves – you can group your timeline into slices to view segments at a time. To show you how, the app will set up some slices for you. It created for me a Tech and Science slice with 34 people, a Business & Money slice with 31 people and a News slice with 9 people. You can filter, right off the bat, people who are not in a slice, so you can “slot” them into a category. Once you organize it, you will be able to easily “slice” through your full feed and see exactly what you want to see when you want to see it. Reminds me a bit of the old Twitter lists concept. Within the slices you can see all types of tweets or just photos and videos, with thumbnail and player right in the tweet. Drill down into follows and add them to a slice from their profile. You can share slices by email, SMS, Tweet and Facebook. Set up your various favorite sharing services within the app for images, video, URL shortening, read later and text expanding. Your saved searches are in there as well and you can start a new search. And, of course, you can tweet yourself from the app.

 

 

 

 


  

 

When the web version drops, it will sync with the mobile version, so you need not miss a beat. You also can upgrade to Pro and lose the ads for $4.99, but I am not sure it is worth that cost to do so.

 

OneLouder is the developer and they aren’t new to the mobile app game – they are the able team behind such great social apps as Friendcaster – my favorite Android Facebook app and Tweetcaster, as well as several other specialized applications.

 

I like Slices a lot – with nearly 1,000 follows, I can use a tool that helps me break out information into categories so I can find what is right now, right now. Nice app – OneLouder!

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Aug 8 2012

Vizify Makes Your Web Information POP!

 

 

To keep pace with the theme from the last post, one way to improve your visibility and hopefully positive message on the Web is by creating profiles on various social sites. Some of those sites, which I tend to highlight here in the Studio, are known as “nameplate” sites – places where you can create a page or two about yourself, often by pulling in content you create on other more popular social sites. You can collect your Web efforts and show them off in one place. Some tend more to the visual web site style, while others feel more like online resume sites. Nameplate sites mentioned here in the past include Flavors.me, Do.id, Zerply, About.me, and a few others I can’t remember off the top of my head right now.

 

Is there room for one more? Of course there is! The more, the merrier. Vizify is the new kid on the block and it manages to differentiate itself from the others by employing a very visually appealing style – culling the key information and presenting it in a bubble-based timeline. Vizify is nice because you don’t need to manually load up information – you simply connect Vizify to your existing sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and it smartly pulls all the key date into the application for you. Once connected, you can then tailor the page by culling information you don’t want and keeping what you do.

 

Vizify is accessible now in public beta form and I think it is worth the five minutes to play around with it and create a profile. Check out mine below, which you can see on the web here.

 

Aug 8 2012

Infographic: Primping For The Web

You spend time on the Web. Whether for business or pleasure, you probably want to appear in a positive light, rather than a negative one. Or maybe you just want to appear. There are ways to improve your Web presence and, particularly if you are promoting your business or profession, you want that Web presence to jump out of the screen and shake your audience’s collective hands.

I have mentioned BrandYourself here in the Studio before. They have crafted this handy infographic that outlines some of the ways you can improve your Web presence. Of course, there is the obligatory self-reference to their own Web-reputation service. Self-promotion aside, there are some nuggets to be gleaned from the chart, including ranking the best sites for visibility – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and nameplate / visual biz site Zerply in that order. For videos, you are better off with Vimeo than YouTube. For your personal blog, pick WordPress – no brainer there. WordPress does a lot to promote its own pages. If you care enough to put the effort in, then it is worth focusing on the best locales for your Web efforts.

Aug 5 2012

Do.com Helps Get Things Done

 

I love a good task management app and Do.com is a great tool from the awesome folks at Salesforce.com for just that. Right now, it’s a fairly stripped down but clean web-based app that allows you to set up projects, assign tasks, see your own tasks, set due dates and keep track of what has been done and what hasn’t been done. This week, the next iteration of the tool is launching in beta and looks to be offering more. The full version of the app is anticipated at the end of August.

 

At heart, it is still the same tool, but organizing gets easier with contact list and Facebook integration. Once integrated, Do.com will show contact changes as your contacts make them elsewhere. You also will be able to create job templates that will allow you to assign the same tasks each time you undertake a similar project with a single click. You will be able to comment on tasks so that assigner and assignee can keep in touch on what is happening around a task.

 

You can get a look at the original Do.com still and get a feel for the new version. And you can request an invite by signing up at the site. Check it out – you might find yourself a lot more organized and on top of the mountains of stuff that needs to get done.

Aug 5 2012

Transcribe Does Just What It Says for Audio Recordings

 

 

The other day I found myself neck deep in research on an arcane topic and, in order to immerse myself, I had cued up a podcast of a news interview on the subject while I was searching and reading material on the Web. I pulled some valuable information out of that podcast, but I wasn’t able to get everything because I was doing too many things at once and I really didn’t have the time to take notes while listening.

 

 

Enter Transcribe. This handy Chrome extension will transcribe audio recordings so that you have a written record and don’t miss a word. You can also navigate to their free tool page here. Pick a local file and the transcribed text will be auto-saved in your browser’s local storage. An audio player bar at the top of the screen is controlled by key strokes – ESC for pause / resume, F! for slow down, F2 for speed up, F3 for rewind two seconds and F4 for fast-forward 2 seconds. You will see the text in the window below the player. So simple and easy to use! Another cool feature? You don’t even need an internet connection to use it – just click on the transcribe extension button in an open browser window and Transcribe will get to work. Everything works locally.

 

There is a paid Pro version as well, with more detail at this link. The only difference I can obviously see is that the Pro version can handle multiple recordings at once.

 

Nice tool there, particularly if you work with audio recordings a lot or need to get interviews or other speeches from audible to written form.