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Ping.fm: Updating Your Social Networks Without Spamming FriendFeed

Ping.fm is a service that allows you to send out updates of various types (status updates, blogs, micro-blogs) to multiple social networks. I have been using it for some time and my results have been mostly positive. This is not a tutorial on how to use it. After seeing the topic on numerous occasions (here, there, everywhere) and reading DeSoto’s “Must blogging be a balancing act?“, I decided to share my Ping.fm strategy to see what others think.

Why?

This is all about increasing my social networking influence. I want to interact with a diverse selection of people because I have diverse interests. Ping.fm allows me to keep all these different groups updated with whatever is going on with me. I can share new music I create, content I’ve written, whatever I choose and I can share it across multiple social networks. I want to learn from others and get their feedback on what I’m doing.

Updating all of your social networks from one place is definitely a time-saver, but it could also have the community thinking you are a spamming moron if done incorrectly. For instance, Most of the services supported by PIng.fm are also supported by FriendFeed, so you could potentially send one update and have it show up several times. This is usually not desirable. I say “usually” because some FF users actually advocate turning everything up to full blast and allowing the user to filter accordingly.

That solution is less than ideal for me. I really don’t want anyone to Hide any of my FriendFeed services because I haven’t really figured out how I’m going to organize them yet. I may duplicate content now, but that may very well change in the near future. So, I decided to devise an updating scheme that allows me room for more flexibility.

What?

Before we get into those details, it’s important to understand how each Ping.fm update type shows up on each social networking service you subscribe to, so here is a table describing a few:

Ping.fm Update Type Bebo Facebook Hi5 Identi.ca
Statuses Changes Status Scraps Dent
Blogs Blog n/a Blog n/a
Micro-Blogs n/a Status n/a Dent
Ping.fm Update Type LiveJournal MySpace Tumblr Twitter Xanga
Statuses Blog Status Blog Tweet Pulse
Blogs Blog Blog Blog n/a Blog
Micro-Blogs Blog n/a Blog Tweet Pulse

Yeah, I have Bebo, MySpace, and Hi5. Big Whoop. Wanna fight about it?

Using Ping.fm, I can actually stay active on networks that I don’t really visit any more than once a week. Here is how I decided to break everything down:

  • I will post full, original content here at SheenOnline. I will also post more personal or off-topic content on LiveJournal and/or Xanga. I haven’t really figured out how this will work yet.
  • The social networking sites that provide a blog service will get excerpts and links back to whichever blog has my full article. I also would like to send excerpts to LJ and Xanga which link to my posts at SheenOnline.
  • Obviously, Identi.ca and Twitter both get my statuses, but I’m mainly only watching for responses on Identi.ca at this point.
  • I have no idea what I’m going to do with Tumblr. I’m thinking I want to pipe everything I write online to Tumblr, but I haven’t researched how much of a pain that would be.

Now that we have a basic (hah!) Ping.fm strategy, how will this fit into FriendFeed? If I were to pipe all this directly in, I would post a total of around 4 items anytime I made a blog post and I don’t think my followers would appreciate that very much. Also, I don’t want any of my services to get hidden.

Services that post to FriendFeed:

  • Identi.ca – Center of my micro-blogging world 🙂
  • LiveJournal – “Personal” blog
  • SheenOnline – Primary blog

Services that didn’t make the cut:

  • Twitter – This would just end up being a duplicate, I rarely post here directly
  • Xanga – Not sure what will go here yet. Possibly nothing 🙂
  • Tumblr – This may end up aggregating just about everything, so definitely not needed for FF

Caveats and Notes

One of the main points of all this is to be able to link everything back to my primary blog here at SheenOnline. Here are the details I found out as far as linking and HTML go:

  • Bebo will make a link clickable automatically
  • Facebook does appear to convert a link properly for statuses
  • Hi5 handles HTML weird. I haven’t figured out reliably how it handles links
  • Identi.ca and Twitter handle links just fine (duh?)
  • LiveJournal converts your links
  • Myspace will convert your links and handles HTML
  • Xanga will handle HTML links

In order to explicitly create a blog post, you can either go to the Ping.fm website, or you can send the content via email (Settings->Edit Profile to find your posting address). By default, Ping.fm sends out a status message, so your email should be of the form:

  • @b <title>^<body>

Conclusion

Please keep in mind, this is not a step-by-step guide that you should follow. I am simply posting this to describe my thought processes surrounding how I leverage Ping.fm to maintain my online presence. Maybe you don’t subscribe to some of the stuff I do and you’re not trying to balance eleventeen blogs.

In a future post, I will talk about drinking from the firehose or “playing in the stream” as J. Phil puts it. If your efforts at connecting with others actually pan out, you will have a lot of incoming data to deal with.

How do you use Ping.fm? Do you use a different service for this? Tell me about it.

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Give Your Pidgin More Bite With Snarl

I recently noticed a shared item from Google Reader in my FriendFeed that I hoped would solve a major issue I’ve had with keeping up with things. I have Remember The Milk for storing my To Do items and Google Calendar for keeping track of dated events. I even have a slick method for capturing events and items via my desktop launcher. I should be on top of things. But there is a piece missing.

Google Calendar allows alerts via Email, Pop-ups, and SMS. This should work out great, except that I don’t have SMS right now, I don’t keep GCal open, and I don’t have a method to notify me of new mail on my desktop. I have Remember The Milk set up to notify me via Google Talk of upcoming items, but there is still a chance I may ignore the new chat window (sometimes I get a little caught up in FriendFeed).

Snarl, in combination with Pidgin, actually provides me the best solution. I always have Pidgin running to handle various communications needs (Yahoo/AIM/GTalk/IRC/Jabber), so it makes perfect sense for my notifications system to center around it.

All I had to do was:

  • Install Snarl
  • Install the Snarl Extension for Pidgin, PidginSnarl
  • Make sure my GTalk Account in Pidgin was set for Email Notifications
  • And enjoy the Snarly goodness!

Here is a screenshot of the types of notifications I get from Pidgin now:

As you can see, I now receive notifications about new email messages, including reminders of how many new emails I have. As an added benefit, I can monitor Identi.ca and other messaging services without actually switching to the Pidgin window.

This means I spend more time on task and doing what I should be doing, and less time playin on Identi.ca. I no longer miss those important podcasts I keep adding to my calendar because I’ll get a desktop notification. I will also recieve new IM’s from Remember The Milk directly to my desktop.

Don’t forget to check out the other extensions available at the Snarl homepage (FireSnarl, for instance).

Did I explain this poorly? Do you have any experience with Snarl or Pidgin that you would like to share? How do you handle notifications to make sure you don’t miss things?

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Remember The Milk: Adding Tags While Sending Tasks

In my post, Remember The Milk: Posting Directly from Your Desktop, we covered how to add items to Remember The Milk using the popular desktop launcher Launchy. This provides us with a lightning-quick way to capture tasks and ideas without interrupting whatever we may currently be working on.

With a simple tweak, we can actually make this setup just a little more useful by allowing us to add tags to the items we are sending to RTM.

Here is the command-line we are currently using for “blat” to email RTM:

– -body ” ” -subject “$$” -to <unique key>@rmilk.com -u <gmail username> -pw <gmail pass> -f <gmail username> -server 127.0.0.1:1099

We are using “$$” here to tell the Launchy Runner plugin to pass our first argument as the subject of the email. What we need to be able to do is to specify a second argument that can be passed as the body of the email:

– -subject “$$” -body “$$” -to <unique key>@rmilk.com -u <gmail username> -pw <gmail pass> -f <gmail username> -server 127.0.0.1:1099

Notice that we have:

  • Swapped the positions of the “subject” and “body” options
  • We are now passing another “$$” to the “body” option

This tells Launchy to use the first argument we send as the subject and the second argument as the body. Now, we can set tags for our tasks as we add them via Launchy:

Pressing the TAB key within Launchy separates the “rtm” command from it’s two arguments. The first argument is the name of the task, and the second are the additional options describing that task.

Keep in mind that we have the choice to set other options for the task besides the tags. You can view the details in the Remember The Milk FAQ on Sending Tasks via Email.

The one caveat here is that you may only specify one option as Launchy doesn’t allow us to enter a line-break.

Was this article helpful? Do you have a better way to do this? I would love to hear from you.

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…But by the Content of Their Character

Success is not based on who is following you on Twitter. Success is not based on how much traffic you get to your blog each day or how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed. Success is not the measure of how many people appear to be watching your content online. If this paragraph makes you frown in confusion, you most certainly need to read on because you are in need of some help.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Aug. 28, 1963

(Thanks to @boycaught for reminding me of the full quote)

This quote by Dr. King not only applies to race, but to any other insignificant or material characteristic of a person. You can’t judge yourself or anyone else based on the statistics surrounding your online presence. Darren even breaks it down into an equation for you and shows how detrimental it can be to your success.

In my post, A Leader Doesn’t Care What You Think, I give a few examples of some characteristics that most leaders share. The overall idea is that someone who is successful, a leader, is one who is always looking ahead. These are people that are always trying to learn from those smarter than themselves.

Is Scoble a success because he has the entire Social Media Militia following him, or are they following him because he often leads to something new and interesting?

Scoble has said on a few different occasions that he seeks to talk to someone interesting and/or learn something new everyday. He doesn’t base his life on what others think about him. This is the attitude you should have if you want to have anything close to the status and respect he has.

Just recently, Twitter users lost huge numbers of their followers and the community was (still is, actually) in an uproar. Their ability to broadcast to hundreds and thousands of listeners was taken away. Cyndy is actually depressed that some Social Medialites are more focused on broadcasting than actually having a conversation, while Corvida writes that this is a golden opportunity to reach out and expand your horizons.

These ideas extend well beyond the realm of the Social Media community, past “The Internets”, and right into your own home:

  • You are not the center of the universe
  • You must become a comet, a moving target
  • No one can follow you if you’re standing still
  • No one will even notice you

Make sure you are not so full of yourself that you can’t take  in anything new. Allow yourself to grow. People will start to listen to you. Your prestige will rise. The followers, the traffic, and all the numbers that some obsess over will eventually follow suit.

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Make FriendFeed Slightly More Productive

FriendFeed is becoming more and more central to my online activity. I feel I have only scratched the surface of what can be accomplished with it. Even at this early stage, I know that I have accelerated the development of relationships, and the growth of my personal knowledge just by being a regular FriendFeeder.

A recent discussion started by jeff(isageek), got me thinking. I really should have tabs for web apps I want to keep tabs on right there in FriendFeed. I mean…I’m always in it anyway, might as well try to get things done while I’m there. You may remember Duncan Riley creating a slew of scripts for adding various tabs to FriendFeed, but there were a few missing that I still needed.

You can’t be productive without access to your Calendar and your Task List, so I created a couple of quick and dirty Greasemonkey scripts based on Duncan’s.

And, just for good measure, let’s go ahead and add a tab for Identi.ca:

Another script that I find I am using a lot is the FriendFeed Read Later script. I don’t see how anyone survives without it. It will allow you to mark an item as “Later” and creates a “Read Later” tab where you can view all of the items you marked. I primarily use it to follow discussions I find interesting without having to hope they resurface or searching for them. I also use this feature to mark items I may want to blog about later.

How do you keep up with your FriendFeed? How do you make sure you stay productive while using it? Enquiring minds want to know. Leave me a comment.

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What Happened to My Priorities?

I remember when I first started trying to get organized years ago. I started off with a Handspring Visor and then moved up to a Palm III. I also remember struggling with prioritizing my tasks. Should I clean the bathroom first, or shave the dog? Which was more important? I think I spent more time fiddling with the priority numbers than actually completing the tasks.

Getting Things Done Doesn’t Prioritize Tasks

Apparently, Getting Things Done (GTD) does not bother with task priorities and Donald over at Life Optimizer gives a great explanation as to why (read the full story here). I never actually thought about this until I saw his post, but it raises another question:

What should you do with the priority settings in your task-management software?

The obvious solution to me was to use the priorities to organize my Projects. Let’s take a look at a simple project to upgrade wordpress (just an ex., get the official steps here):

  1. Make Backups
  2. Deactivate Plugins
  3. Upload New Files
  4. Upgrade Database

In this example, we see the Priority for each task will just correspond to the order in which it should be completed. Each task directly depends on the one before it.

It also just so happens that Remember The Milk has exactly 4 priorities to chose from. The simplest way to set a priority for a task is to click the task to highlight it and press a number (1 thru 4). This will set the tasks priority and add an indicator. Priority if 4 is the default, so you see no indicator.

What if your Project has more than 4 steps?

Since each task in the project depends on the one before it, you would simply re-prioritize (or re-number) the project each time you complete a task or each time you finish all tasks you have already prioritized.

What if I can do groups of tasks simultaneously?

This is great! Just give these tasks the same priority. Once you hit a task that depends on one or all of them, move up to the next priority.

  1. Thing A
  1. Thing B
  2. Thing AB
  3. Thing C

Conclusion

There is no need to agonize over priorities on your task list. The only time priority really matters is within a Project and, since we define a project as a sequence of tasks, setting prorities should be a no-brainer. If you would like to implement priorities into your Remember The Milk usage, keep in mind that you can search for tasks with a specific priority (ie. search for “priority:1” to find first priority tasks). You could even use this knowledge to get rid of the “-next” tag. Just give your Next Actions a priority of 1 and search on that.

How do you prioritize your tasks? Can you think of another way to use priorities to help get things done? Leave a comment.

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The A-List Doesn’t Care About Your FriendFeed

“You can have relationships and discussions with people on FriendFeed without them actually being a part of your network”

I finally decided to check out this friendvenn app and was actually surprised at some of the names I saw that don’t follow me. There is no reason I should have made the assumption they cared about my content, but I did. What I realized is that you can have relationships and discussions with people on FriendFeed without them actually being a part of your network. I hadn’t really thought about this before. Not directly, anyway.
As for those people that don’t follow me, there was some discussion on

FriendFeed here and there where some FriendFeeders say it’s just not possible to keep up with that many subscriptions.

Not being part of the popular clique myself, I wouldn’t know anything about dealing with a huge number of followers. What I do know is this:

  • Stuff that is probably boring, not interesting, or blatant crap won’t stick on the first few pages of FF
  • The Hide feature is quite useful in trimming the fat
  • FriendFeed users (FriendFeeders?) may very well need better ways to figure out who to subscribe to. I mean, how do you deal with hundreds of Follows? View each person’s feed? *shudder*

“I would like a personal message from all A-Listers explaining why they don’t follow me”

I am a bit curious as to why some people haven’t followed me back:

  • Did I say something wrong?
  • Is it because I’m black?
  • Is it the missing LinkedIn Profile?
  • Does my breath stink?

In the end, it really is just curiosity. If I was to ever post something interesting, it would probably get Liked by someone they do follow. What I wonder is, have people made a conscious decision to ignore me? If so, I would probably be a better person for knowing why.

So, I would like a personal message from everyone on my list explaining why they don’t follow me. Oh…wait…they won’t see this anyway. Nevermind.

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To Do Lists Are Not Just About Task-Management

You To Do list may be a lot more powerful than you think. Here are a few ideas that may get your imagination working as to how you can harness the full power of one of the most basic organizational tools. Feel free to share any ideas you have in the comments section.

Borrowing/Lending

Tracking things you have lent or borrowed is quite useful. You can apply the same ideas from my Super Charging Remember The Milk series. For example, if Bill borrowed your iPhone, then you could create a task named “My iPhone” and give it tags like “-waiting, @lent, bill, iphone.”

In this case, I have set the context of this item to “lent” by preceding it with the “@” symbol. This allows me to create a Smart List later, to organize all the things I have “lent.” You will also notice that I have tagged the item Bill’s name so that I know who to harass when I start missing my iPhone. You can do the same thing for items you have borrowed.

Content Ideas

I have set up my desktop so that I can add items to Remember The Milk in the blink of an eye. Not only does this make sure that I don’t miss anything I need to do, but it also allows me to quickly collect any random ideas I get for content. I might be reading a blog post over on SheGeeks and get an idea for a new song. Or I could just be poking around on FriendFeed and get an idea for an awesome blog post.

Either way it goes, I can stick these things into Remember The Milk and flesh them out later. For instance, I might tag a new song idea with “-next, @studio, metal.”

Reading List

One of the best things you can do to increase your value as a person is to read. This will help your success in life immensely. People will be more willing to see you as a leader if you have a little more knowledge than they do. I sometimes add books others recommend to my reading list in Remember The Milk so that I can remember to borrow or buy them at some point.

Conclusion

You To Do list can be of much more use to you than simply checking off tasks. There are things that are not really actionable tasks, but are not really projects either. Also, some things you may want to stick on the Someday/Maybe side of things, might do better to have their own category. Experiment and see what works for you.

Do you store things on your To Do list that some might say shouldn’t be there? Do you have ideas about extending your To Do list that I haven’t covered? Did you like this article? Leave a comment. I would love to hear about it.

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Remember The Milk: Posting Directly from Your Desktop

In a recent post, we talked about 6 Ways to Add A Task to Remember The Milk. While the methods discussed were varied and useful, I was not satisfied with any of them. This post will show you another quick method to handle this.

I have very simple criteria for being able to add tasks to my ToDo list:

  • It must be quick
  • It must not disturb my current work flow
  • It must be reliable

I had almost satisfied all of these using the solution involving Launchy, Curl, and Twitter. Launchy is probably the fastest desktop launcher available for Windows. So the procedure went like this:

  • Launchy pops up instantly when I hit ALT+Space
  • I type in “rtm<TAB>Task Description<ENTER>” (rtm is just a batch file in my path)
  • The task is added to my Remember The Milk Inbox list via Twitter

If we review the last item on my list of criteria, we see that our posting method needs to be reliable. Well, Twitter shouldn’t even be in the same sentence. I have actually been burned before using this setup, as you can read about in my post How Twitter Keeps Me from Getting Things Done.

So, how do we make it better? I had to find a way to get Twitter out of the picture. If you recall, You can add tasks to Remember The Milk via email. All I needed was a way to shoot off an email to RTM from within Launchy. Problem solved, right? Well…not really. GMail apparently makes this slightly more complicated.

This is about to get pretty technical, but I will try to break it down as simple as I can. If I don’t do a good job, please leave a comment and I will be happy to help 🙂

Download, Install, and Configure “Stunnel”

We need Stunnel so that we can communicate with the Gmail server securely. From the website:

Stunnel is a program that allows you to encrypt arbitrary TCP connections inside SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) available on both Unix and Windows.

So, here is what we need to do:

  • Download Stunnel from the Binaries Page. The version I used is 4.25 (direct download link)
  • Run the installer and hit “Close” once complete
  • Now, edit C:\Program Files\stunnel\stunnel.conf
  • Replace the “Service Options” section with the following:

[SMTP Gmail]
accept = 127.0.0.1:1099
connect = smtp.gmail.com:465

[POP3 Gmail]
accept = 127.0.0.1:1109
connect = pop.gmail.com:995

  • From the same directory, run the command “stunnel -install”
  • Then run the command “net start stunnel”

Download, Install, and Configure “Blat”

We need Blat so that we can send email right from the command line.

Blat is a Win32 command line utility that sends eMail using SMTP or post to usenet using NNTP.

  • Get Blat from here: http://www.blat.net/
  • Open the archive and stick “blat.exe” into C:\Windows\System32\ or somewhere else in your path
  • Run the command: blat -install smtp.gmail.com yourusername@gmail.com

Configure Launchy

You already have Launchy, right? If not, you are probably not working very efficiently, you are on a MAC, or both. Go ahead and fire it up now.

  • Open Launchy’s Options dialog (click the gear), go to Plugins and click Runner.
  • Hit the “+” button to add a new command
  • Enter something nifty for the Name (“rtm”, maybe?)
  • In the Program field, Enter the path to the Blat executable: C:\Windows\System32\blat.exe
  • In the Arguments field, Enter the following:

– -body ” ” -subject “$$” -to [Your unique RTM Email Address] -u [Gmail Username] -pw [Gmail Password] -f [Your Gmail Address] -server 127.0.0.1:1099

  • Hit “Ok,” we’re done here

Make sure you include the preceding “-” and the space between the quotes for the body argument. To find your unique Remember The Milk email address, login to RTM and go to Settings->Info. You want the Inbox Email Address.

Conclusion

Now, you can hit ALT+Space (or whatever key you have it set to), type “rtm<TAB>task<ENTER>” and you have just added a task to Remember The Milk without even breaking stride.

Being able to quickly dump tasks/ideas out of your head and into your organization system of choice is pretty important. Without doing this, you will never get anything done because you won’t ever know what to do.

More often than not, you are going to be in the middle of something when an idea strikes you for something else that you need to capture. As we all know, if you get interrupted, it takes about 10 minutes or so to find your place and get back into the groove.

This is why I have been so anal about this specific facet of my system. I don’t believe there is a faster way, short of direct brain-to-computer communication, to capture your thoughts to your to-do list.

How do you make sure you can capture things at all times? Do you have a better method than me? I’d like to hear about it. Leave me a comment.

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A Leader Doesn’t Care What You Think

Leaders of the packDo you find yourself worrying about how others perceive you? Are you often embarrassed or anxious about others judging you? If so, you definitely have some work to do. Your success in life is contingent on your ability to ignore others and focus on “doing you.”

In her post, What People Think of Me is None of My Business, Samsara offers details on why some people tend to worry so much about the opinions of others. She also offers various methods you can apply to avoid this type of thinking.

What does this really have to do with being successful? If you are focused on what others think about you, that small voice of intuition that nudges you toward your goals may be ignored. You will take actions based on what others expect of you rather than what you feel is right. You have just become a follower. Congratulations! I’ll be taking your leadership badge now. Get back in line, please.

A leader leads. They move on, unerringly, toward their goal. They don’t look back to see if anyone is coming with them or to conduct a poll on what to do next. A leader is too busy achieving things and covering new ground to worry about what people think of them.

Do you care what others think?

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Would You Still Love Me If I Post for Pay?

I have to admit that the I was turned on to blogging because I wanted to make money. I kept reading about it being a good way to market online, but it also held a special attraction for me because, well….I’m a geek. Now that I have been blogging for a few months, I realize that I would much rather blog about whatever I find interesting and the “monetary gain” part has taken a back seat. BUT…I still gotta pay the bills, right?

Enter the PayPerPost blog network. I know…you’re already groaning and rolling your eyes. PayPerPost (aka IZEA) is definitely not the most respected company in the blogging community. They don’t require you to mention the fact that a post was written for money, so this opens up a whole can of worms regarding blogger respect and credibility. Which brings us back to my original question: Would You Still Love Me If I Post for Pay?

The answer is that I’m going to do it anyway. I care about my readers and their opinions, but I have mouths to feed. I try to provide the best possible content that I can with every post that I write. I aim to educate, train, inform, and entertain. If I find avenues where I can get some up-front money to cover a topic of interest, wouldn’t I be an absolute moron not to take it? So, here are the rules:

  • I will write posts for pay
  • I will not write about things that have nothing to do with my blog
  • I will blatantly flag these posts as being paid for
  • I will make sure that these posts only serve to further the goals of this blog

I’m not just going to turn my blog into a steamy, spammy trash sludge of product reviews and blatant advertisements for the sake of earning money. Quality is very important to me and I would like to make sure it is not compromised.

From where I sit, this is a good opportunity to get paid for doing what I love. I keep seeing PayPerPost all across the blogosphere, even on blogs that don’t suck, so it’s gotta be worth something.

It’s ultimately up to you, isn’t it, my faithful reader? Do you trust me? Have my past actions shown me to be a respectable and honorable person? Do you think I would jeopardize my personal brand for a quick buck? Do you post for pay?

Feel free to respond in the comments…

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UBD Money Maker Theme and Expected Blog Content

Unique Blog Designs recently released the UDB MoneyMaker Theme, which I promptly installed and modified for my own evil desires. For some strange reason, it really caught my eye and I had to have it.

A quick list of things I hacked:

The funny thing here is that I had also decided that this wouldn’t be a Money Maker blog. I mean, how many of those can really succeed? I like money, I like making money, but I also like Social Media and Web 2.0 and those things are much more interesting to talk about for me.

To lay it all out there for you, my faithful reader, I will be blogging mostly about Social Media and Web 2.0 as they relate to self-improvement and increasing quality of life. There will be a focus on organization, motivation, marketing, and home business.

I can never stress enough how important it is to educate yourself, learn to use new tools and do new things. Once you have a base of “book smarts”, there is no telling where imagination can take you, and this is where success flows. I want to help others get there.