Missed Tweets Through News.me

I've never really been a twitter nut.  There are already enough sources of distraction for me, I don't need to add another source.  It just seemed really noisy.

However, people have been saying and linking to important things on twitter for a while now.  I'm just not discerning enough and don't have enough time to filter the firehose in a useful way.

The most helpful summary of interesting news I skim regularly is the weekly LinkedIn emails.  In fact, I think it may have been through a link chain from one of those emails that I stumbled on unionfs, as reported in the last post.  If I could have the same thing for twitter, but personalized to the people I follow, that would be really helpful!

Ironically, as part of the effort to make this blog more stuble-upon-able, I was looking for a way to auto-post on twitter and facebook whenever I post on this blog, and I found twitterfeed.com, which does all of that and more.  And it's easy to set up.

After setting that up this morning, I wondered: "What is the company behind twitterfeed.com?", and found betaworks.  They run some very interesting sites/companies, some of which I knew about (bit.ly), some of which were new to me (findings.com, chartbeat.com).  The interesting one for me right now was another site called news.me.

Turns out that news.me is just the kind of thing that has the chance of making twitter useful to me.  If things go well, you'll probably hear more about it.

5 Minute Send

There is something that happens in my mind when (and only when) I push "Send" on an email.

This mental process says "oh, I wonder how it will look when they get this email". So then I go back and look at the email from a completely different perspective -- from the perspective of the recipient. Everybody has a "missed attachment" feature or plugin. But nobody has a "missed idea" feature or a "missed stupidity" feature.

I wish all the email clients I use (gmail, outlook, other webmail) had the following two features:

• "Send" (on a draft message) which means: send in 5 minutes
• "Send All Pending" (on a global menu, not on a message)

Then I could get the benefit of focused authoring *and* self-review when I press "Send" and think "oh, what have I just done".

P.S. I really like blogger's "Post date and time" feature, and I use it all the time.