Time Warner Cable Sucks

This has been an incredibly difficult week for me in terms of technology. Having to rely on services that are out of my control can get challenging, especially when they all go bad at once.

Early this week Time Warner Cable went out in my area (and most of Los Angeles I understand), then my Twitter account was mysteriously suspended for half a day, and finally yesterday my email service was out all day…a day that I was waiting for some mission critical messages.

Continuing with the theme of following others on Twitter, I previously wrote about how to follow good people and a strategy for unfollowing some as well. Since I’m into organization, especially with email, I thought I would share with you my strategy for sorting and following back those that choose to follow me.

Manage Twitter With Rules (click for full size image)

When somebody follows you on Twitter you will typically get an email telling you so.  This is great…to a point.  I found that My inbox was getting cluttered with email alerts from Twitter (don’t get me wrong, I love my followers!) but it was challenging to wade through and find more time sensitive emails, especially since my primary account goes to my iPhone.  In the interest of streamlining the process and to make sure that I don’t miss anybody (I like to follow back real people, but not robots), this is how I sort it out.

1. Create an email account for Twitter.  I originally used my primary address (matt at mattsingley dot com) for my Twitter account, but found that I didn’t like it all going to the same place.  I create a unique account that is used only at Twitter, so now the info won’t go to my iPhone, just my primary and secondary computers.
2. Create a “rule” for sorting.  I use Microsoft Outlook, so I simply created a rule that the email will follow.  You can do this by right-clicking a message and choosing “Create Rule…” or Tools–>Rules and Alerts–>New Rule.  I made the rule that any email sent to my unique address that contains “is now following you” in the subject goes to a special folder I created called “Twitter Followers”.  This way it doesn’t sit in my inbox, and I can go check it out anytime without disrupting my normal work flow.
3. Sign up for SocialToo.  I discussed this in my unfollowing post, but it should be repeated here.  Sign up at SocialToo and select the option to get a daily email.  Once a day I receive an email that shows who started following me (thank you!) and who unfollowed me (it stings a little!).
4. Create a “rule” for SocialToo.  Using the method described in #2, I created a rule that not only puts my daily SocialToo report into my Twitter Followers folder, but it also flags it for follow up that day.  Now to follow back I just open up that one email, check out who is new, and when I’m finished I can mark the flag as completed.  No more retracing my steps!

That’s it!  A quick and simple way to organize your friends in Twitter.  Of course there are tools (even in SocialToo) that allow you to automatically follow everybody that follows you…but where is the community in that?  I actually click on every single person’s link, read their bio, look at their tweets and often click through to their website.  I still think Twitter is a conversation and not a lecture, so the more tha I can interact with people and get to know them, the better!  If you have any strategies that you use to organize your Twitter life I would love to hear about them in the comments or with an @ reply to me.

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Transfer Feedburner to Google

After countless months of watching the slow death of Feedburner, it has finally been announced that it will no longer be an active service after February 28, 2009.  If you use Feedburner to manage RSS and email subscriptions you should log into your account and click on the tiny little link at the top of the page that tells you to transfer to Google now. I did it in just a few simple clicks (it’s helpful to be signed into Google when you initiate the transfer, saves a couple of clicks) and after several minutes everything was finished.

Their FAQ page on Google answers should address any questions you have, like if you will lose any subscribers in the process of the transfer (Google assures us that the answer is no) and changes in the Feedburner API.

I’m glad for the change, I think the service has been lacking for some time.  A quick scan of Twitter of Technorati at any given moment will reveal plenty of complaints like “Feedburner says I just lost over 300 subscribers overnight” and the like.  Let’s hope that Google can stabalize the service on their platform and give us accurate reports.

Have you ever had a computer crash?  Hard drive failure, BSOD, an unfortunate meeting of Diet Coke and your hardware?  I have.  It’s painful.  Trying to restore data feels like something that the U.N. should condemn as universally cruel and unusual.  System failure and data recovery is such a horrible thing to go through, it used to be a nice source of revenue for my former tech company…people would hire us and pay a lot of money to see if we could recover their financials, their emails, their files and their pictures.  If you have ever gone though this, you know what I’m talking about.

I recently started using a company that I wish existed back when I was spending entirely too much time with data recovery.  Mozy is an online service that allows users to backup data from their computer to an online storage container.  Best of all? Its basic service is FREE.  The setup is amazingly simple; just sign up with your email address (no credit card required…nice!), download the app for your PC or Mac, and start your backup.  It’s secure as heck (128-bit encryption for transfer, 448-bit Blowfish key for encryption on their server) and very easy to use.  Some of the features of Moxy Home that are so appealing:

• Backs up Outlook automatically.  I love this, I cannot lose my email or contacts. This is a non-negotiable and is critical to me.
• 2GB of space!  If you take all of your downloaded music out of the picture, 2GB is enough for most users to back up most of their critical files. Of course if you want to back up music as well, you can purchase an account with more space than you’ll ever use for just $4.95/month. That’s not bad.
• Click and go.  The interface is so easy, the first time you run it Mozy will suggest folders that it thinks you should back up.  I was thinking that I would need to go through all of my folders and choose, but it took a potential hour long process and turned it into a 30 second decision.  I appreciate that!
• Automatic backups.  Although I won’t use this too much on my laptop because it’s off and on constantly, I will for my home computer.  
• Incremental backups.  This means that after the initial full backup it will only backup files that have been changed since you last ran it.  This makes backup time almost not even noticeable.  This is very important to me.
• Options. A lot of options.  If you want to just let Mozy set everything up for you, it’s not a problem.  It’s ready to go out of the box, and everything works well.  If you are like me, you want to pop the hood and tinker a little bit.  The options control panel let’s me satisfy my inner geek by giving me enough choices to make me smile.
• If you are on Twitter like I am, you can follow the official company account here. I love it when companies are on Twitter.

I think the Mozy Home service will work for most people, but if you are a power user or company, they offer two other tiers of service with things like SQL and Exchange backup, unlimited storage space and sub-administration/department controls.  

I was turned on to Xobni at the Blogworld Expo in Vegas a few weeks back.  I’ve been using it on my laptop and primary desktop computers, and I think that I really am a little more productive with it. That, and I am a freakshow when it comes to data and graphs and Xobni has plenty of both!

This Windows-only Outlook plugin is a free download and installs quickly and easily, no headaches when I went through it. Sorry Entourage users and others, I see that other platforms are in dev right now so hang tight. So what does it do? Read on.

As a window that sits to the right of my Outlook inbox it is…if nothing else…a nice visual break from the business look of Outlook.  It is more than just another pretty face though, it adds quite a bit of useful utility to my work day.  The first thing I noticed was its incredible tie in to LinkedIn.  When I get an email from somebody that used LinkedIn it previews the email with their public profile picture and allows me to link over to their information easily.  I’ve added a few people to my LinkedIn network this way.

It actually summarizes quite a bit of information about a particular person.  When I click on an email in my inbox it shows me that person’s “network” and allows me to click through to each person.  This has been useful a few times as I’ve needed to dig a bit deeper with somebody and was able to look at their associations.

Another beautiful feature, the one I use the most, is a preview of my conversations with a person (recent emails) and my ability to click thru to them and have a preview show up in the Xobni box.  Very handy.  Although it’s easy enough to search through my inbox and folders, this is even easier.  I love this part of it.  But wait…I’m a data geek right?  Where is the firehose of data?  Xobni installs its own submenu in the main menu, a quick click and selection of “Xobni Analytics” brings me to a place of statistics nirvana.

There are a raft of useful headings here, including “Time To Respond”, “Unique Contacts” and “Follow Up Delay”.  A click on “Mail Traffic” shows me a chart of sent and received emails and time of day.  A historical chart of this is quite helpful to me in terms of how I spend my time.  Also, it helps me to get into a new habit I’m trying to develop: not always having my Outlook opened.  I’m trying to check in every hour or so, but not be a slave to the constant preview pane of new messages.  So far this has been working well for me.

I’ve only scatched the surface of uses for Xobni, you ought to download it and try it yourself.  Of course you would be interested to know that the Xobni crew is on Twitter, they just don’t update too much. Drop me a note if you find Xobni to be useful, I would like to hear about other experiences.  I think a lot of people will like this.  Heck, the Wall Street Journal even does!

Google is introducing an interesting new feature to their Gmail…math.

Apparently the working class digerati are notorious enough for sending late night emails while tipsy (especially the Brits) that Google felt it worthy to add some complexity to the process of sending email.  So now (during certain hours…late night and weekends…) you will be required to solve a few moderately complex math problems before the mail will send.

Wow.  I’m not even sure what to say about that.  You can read more info on TechCrunch.