Twitter is surprisingly addictive. When I first heard about it I thought, why would I want to send an SMS message to a bunch of people to let them know what I was doing? The idea of receiving a slew of texts wasn’t too appealing either especially if the content was stuff like “I am at the bus stop” or “I’m going to the grocery store”.  I joined Twitter reluctantly when I attended a technical conference back in September because the conference organizers were promoting it and communicating to attendees via the free service.

So what is Twitter? PC.com has a good write up titled Family friendly Twitter Tips and explains:

‘This free Web-based service shares qualities with blogging, social networking, instant messaging, and chatting, but is not exactly any of these things. Twitter allows you to broadcast 140-character dispatches (or “tweets”) to your friends and followers from your computer or cell phone; everything from what you’re doing at any given moment (“at coffee shop consuming 1500 calorie snack”) to links you want to pass along to replies to other Twitter users. Using Twitter isn’t unlike sitting in a friendly cafe overhearing bits conversation around you and then piping up when you feel like it.”

Read the rest of the PC.com article to see how you can use Twitter to keep up with your family. I’ve been using Twitter to broadcast blog updates and post random thoughts and activities. I’m not sending a Tweet for everything I do, but I can see (and follow a few people) how it’s easy to do.

Check out my Tweets at http://www.twitter.com/rbrambley, or if you sign up then follow me. I also have a widget in the sidebar of this web page with my 10 latest tweets.

Here are some other applications and add-ons to compliment Twitter that I have found useful. (more…)

If you are like me you have multiple web and pop3 email accounts, multiple instant messaging identities, and belong to several social networking sites. In all of these accounts you get frequent messages or updates that you have a hard time keeping up with across several independent clients. I recently realized that Digsby is the consolidated single client answer for my problem.

From Digsby.com:

“digsby is a multiprotocol IM client that lets you chat with all your friends on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber with one simple to manage buddy list.”

“digsby is an email notification tool that alerts you of new email and lets you perform actions such as ‘Delete’ or ‘Report Spam’ with just one click”

“digsby is a social networking tool that alerts you of events like new messages and gives you a live Newsfeed of what your friends are up to.”

For example, I am using Digsby to monitor my Gmail, Yahoo, and vmetc.com POP3 email accounts, my Gmail and Yahoo instant messaging accounts, and follow updates on Twitter and Linked In. The screen shot in this post is my desktop client. Using the Digsby options you can configure the program to remain running after you close the desktop client and then provide Outlook style pop up notifications when you receive new communicatons.

Since the majority of my accounts are web page -based, setting up new accounts was (more…)