greplin | Advocate's Studio

Readers here may recall me extolling the virtues of Greplin, the app that lets you search across social networks and emails in your cloud to find that needle in the haystack you thought you remember seeing sometime long ago. Well, Greplin has morphed into Cue and has gotten a bit smarter and more agile. The basic premise remains the same – you can organize your information across accounts so you can pull that information and actually use it. But now Cue will actually index your information and combine snippets that appear to be connected, resulting in an almost semantic collection of related data that makes sense. So, if you are searching for a meeting you know you scheduled for a month from now, Cue will not just give you the meeting information in your calendar, it will give you contact information for attendees and emails pertaining to the meeting. Pretty cool.

Cue also has added support for your iOS calendars, and allows you to set which calendars will show up in your Cue. Cue indexes information from Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, iPhone Calendars, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, iCloud Mail, Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for free. Premium, costing $50 a year or $5 monthly, adds Evernote, Salesforce, Yammer, Basecamp, Reddit, Pinboard, Delicious, Tumblr and Google Reader accounts. That is a whole lot of information.

If you haven’t tried Cue, I suggest you do – more than once it has been able to find a lost email or post whose location I couldn’t quite remember. It’s nice to have the mental backup. Works on your iDevice or the web. Check it out.

If you have an iPhone, you are familiar with Spotlight Search. If you have a presence in the cloud, then the cloud-counterpart to Spotlight might be Greplin (link here). Akin to Spotlight’s ability to search your entire hard-wired iDevice memory and across applications for the keyword you specify, Greplin let’s you search through all of your public and private content across the cloud-based services you hook up to your Greplin account.

News of Greplin first broke back in March, 2010. Now Greplin is available in private beta. Submit your registration at the link above and select the on-line haunts you wish to connect: Facebook; Gmail; Twitter; DropBox; LinkedIn; Google Calendar; and Google Docs. A pro account, for the measly sum of $45 per year, allows you to also connect to Salesforce, Evernote, Box, Basecamp, and Google Voice transcripts. How totally awesome is that?

If you have been working at all in the cloud, participating in the soc nets, and curating and sharing content, how can Greplin NOT be a winner? I repeatedly find myself searching within the various sites I use for old links or content that I had forgotten to star or favorite or otherwise file in an easy to find place. Not all sites archive. Not all search functions are up to my standards. No more – now all I will need to do is remember that the information had something to do with semantic search or the conference I am supposed to attend in six months and, with Greplin, I’m off to the races.

This is yet another piece in the puzzle-theme I am pressing here in the Studio today: you have to streamline and organize your on-line life. With Priority Inbox, you can take control of the important Gmail tasks first. With relevance filters, you can cut right to the newest information on the Web about your preferred topics. And now, with Greplin, you can quickly put your finger on the fruits of your on-line research and networking efforts – giving you that much power over the most treasured commodity of our time – relevant data.