If I Have Unlimited Choice, How Do I Decide?

Just over a week ago I highlighted a chance to get on AssetBar as provided by Louis Gray, as well as introduce LinkRiver, picked up from the same source.

I don’t know how many people took up those invitations, but I sure did and I have to admit my reaction is kinda mixed. I liked the features of AssetBar, but not the UI (user interface). I liked LinkRiver’s functions, but found it a little hard to find friends. All in all, great products, but I wasn’t sure they would ever take the place of Google Reader. Not that it really mattered, I wasn’t looking for a replacement, just different ways of using the same RSS function on the web.

As a pretty typical Internet user, my attention span isn’t great, and I thought “Ok nice programme, doesn’t do a lot for me, I’ll try to keep it in mind.” What changed it was that creators from both applications dropped me a message at my blog to say “look out for this” or “just to clarify this”.

In other words: they were listening. I commented on this somewhere, which lead to Louis beating me to the punch (on time, but not message), that companies that listen to their users will win in the end

And that alone was enough for me to consciously set aside time to continually explore their applications, and I’m sure one day they’ll give Google Reader a run for their money.

If you’ve had similar stories, or other such applications/programmes to share, feel free to comment and share them!

By the way, I am well aware that these posts are just flying over the heads of many of my friends, but I’m going to be introducing 2 things that have totally changed my internet usage habits: RSS and del.icio.us. So if you’ve been one of them who’s been telling me “your blog is so technical now” or “why do I want to be even more connected?”. Stay tuned and read on.

More Entrants To Introduce

A more social post: Three friends whose blog I’d love for you to check out

All Quirk No Play by Nabilah, I can’t decide how to categorise her blog, except: interesting.

Body Treats by Calin, who has a goldmine of health tips to keep you in the pink of health

and finally Striped: Shirt from Andre, whose blog is pretty similar to mine. You can also follow him on Twitter to if you like!

And just to build some anticipation, I’ve decided to add a couple of new features to the blog:

1) Podcast of the month – Out of the episodes of various shows that I’ve listened to over the month, I’ll choose the one that was my favourite.

2) Del.icio.us links of the week – Not many people are on AssetBar or LinkRiver, so this will be a post to let everyone know the few interesting posts I came across in the week. (full disclosure: I borrowed the idea from Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim)

3) Adventures in social media – I’ve had quite a few great experiences being connected to people online and will be sharing them here.

Hope you will love all of these new segments! Do comment as the begin to appear!

Twitter Recap Of Yahoo! Firing

Yahoo! laid off some workers earlier this week and one employee gave a step-by-step account of his ordeal via Twitter. Some of his posts:

Y! layoffs today, I’m “impacted”. I’m heading into work to pack my desk, get my severance paperwork and hand in my badge…more to come. about 10 hours ago

On the plus side, my commute just got a lot shorter. about 10 hours ago.

Walking around saying good bye to some great people and good friends. about 9 hours ago

Waiting for the call from HR so I can go pick up my paperwork….C’mon, c’mon! I’m busy here! Let’s get this over with. about 8 hours ago

Thanks to everyone sending the positive tweets. I’ve got plenty of free time now so just let me know if you want to meet up for lunch. about 8 hours ago

I first read about the whole story over at Jaffe Juice, head over there to read the rest of the tweets.

While undoubtedly it’s a sad instance in which Twitter was used, I can’t help but wonder if this really does help portray how useful Twitter can be in certain settings. What would we have heard if a someone two buildings away from the Twin Towers was on Twitter on 9/11? There’s still decent amount of debate online whether or not Twitter is useful. I’d love to hear what you think. Largely useful? Somewhat useful? Not useful? Don’t know? Give me a shout.

On the upside, I noticed that my Twitter 201 coverage got almost double the views than of the Twitter100 series. I really hope that that’s benefited you and helped you use Twitter a little better. New articles on Twitter are coming up literally every half a day, but I’m going to move on from covering those stories unless it’s something original that I come up with. If you want to follow me on Twitter, my username is uniquefrequency.

I’ve been playing around with both AssetBar and LinkRiver for about two hours today and I’m beginning to get a pretty good feel of them. I’ll probably be directing some attention to them this week.

Both creators were kind enough to post responses to my posts on them, and I really think you should check them out. They’re both not as fun without people on them, because they’re meant to be social! So far I only have Louisgray for company. If you do sign up, add me as a friend: uniquefrequency

Breaking: Get On AssetBar Now!

For all you early adopters, the AssetBar invites have been re-opened over at Louisgray, don’t miss it this time!

There’s a little technical requirements with OPML, but just click at the buttom of the page for a simple guide on YouTube.

I’ve already signed up and am very, very excited to explore the social features of sharing what essentially is your RSS feeds.

If you do sign up, do add me as a friend as well, my user name is uniquefrequency (surprise!)

Yet Another Centraliser: LinkRiver

Louisgray is very quickly becoming one of my top “must reads” whenever something comes from his RSS feed. Late January he alerted the blogosphere about AssetBar, and now he has the latest on LinkRiver.

So we already use Google Reader or some other RSS reader, why LinkRiver? Without trying it out yet, the biggest draw for me is that is aggregates everything from your RSS feeds to Twitter to Del.icio.us bookmarks into one central location. As Louis says:

harnesses your RSS streams from multiple services, including Google Reader shared items, Twitter, del.icio.us, Yahoo! Bookmarks and others, and posts them to a single “Stream”. As your friends join the service, or you choose to subscribed to other LinkRiver users, these small streams become a “River” of shared links, hence the name.

 

To get a real good idea, check out Louis’s stream right here. I for one am already sold and have sent in my beta application.

The one negative that I can see coming out of it is if someone is pushing similar feeds on social bookmarks, Google Reader and Twitter, and then it could get very tiresome to deal with. I suppose we’ll find out soon won’t we?

Do you keep your feeds/updates central? Or is there some other way you keep on top of everything? Let me know.

Alerts On Readburner, Social Alternative To Google Reader

I woke to four comments today from Mike Reynolds from SquirrelNet and was curious how he stumbled upon the site. He forwarded me an email from a Google Alert on Readburner, which was a feature I hadn’t used before, but I’m definitely going to now. Yet another reason why Readburner is just awesome.

I’ve been up for about an hour, and I’ve already added three new additions to my Google Reader feeds, namely SquirrelNet, MediaShift (thanks to a Feedhead post by Prof. Netzley who shared a great post on How Google & Wiki have changed our lives) and Louisgray.com, referred to by Mike. No wonder it’s taking me longer and longer to check my feeds every day!

Anyway, on Louisgray, there’s an interesting article about AssetBar, which looks like a competitor to Google Reader, with a social element built in. Basically while you can share feeds in Google Reader, you don’t know what someone else might be thinking about it, other than the person liked it enough to share it. AssetBar changes that by allowing users to rate articles and comment on them as well. I haven’t had the time to try it yet, but hopefully I will soon and see if the whole commenting thing turns up anything interesting.