How I am using FriendFeed

This is how I’m using FriendFeed:

• “Like” – quickly mark an entry as interesting
  Items you liked are shown in your home feed and under “Me”, Tab “Comments and Likes”
• Lists
  • regular - for people I don’t want to miss
  • qualified - for people I regularly interact with
  • personal – for people I know in real life
  • all – everyone
  • + some topic specific lists
• “Best-of-day/week/month” – very fast and efficient way to get an idea what was interesting today for the people I follow
• “Imaginary Friends” – not everyone is on FriendFeed – follow them by creating their streams as an imaginary friend.
• I also use imaginary friends for rss feeds like “twittersearch for gtd”
• Rooms:
  • private room for “all time favorites” – with comments like “research further”
  • topic related rooms
• one of my favorite FriendFeed feature: for shortened links (bit.ly, tinyurl, ..) FriendFeed shows the full url as mouse-over-text
• Post to FriendFeed-bookmarklet (you can find it via “Tools”)
  I really like the ability to include pictures in your post by just clicking on them – helps you remembering what this was all about. Any text marked on the page while clicking the bookmarklet is automatically set as comment
• Twitter integration (via “Account” – “Feed publishing”):
  I automatically post my entries from Google Reader, Diigo and FriendFeed to my twitter account

Moved

I moved to a new blogging platform (Wordpress on my own domain)
please go here: http://blog.abenker.com
Thank You :-)

My Top 5 IPhone Apps for daily use

I have many different apps installed on my IPhone 3G, but most of them are rarely used.

Here is the list of my very own personal Top 5 IPhone applications, which I use almost daily.

The links on the app names will send you to the homepage of the apps – not the ITunes store.

1. RTM – RememberTheMilk – task management
   RTM is the core part of my trusted GTD-system. Since the app stores the tasks locally, I don’t depend on internet access to know what to do next ;-)
   This app can only be used, if you sign up for a pro membership (25$ per year)
2. Twitterfon – Twitter client, free
   In the past I used Twinkle a lot, but Twitterfon feels better for me – and faster.
3. Facebook – client for Facebook, free
4. Fahrplan – public transit information - specific for Germany, free
   not used daily, but every time I go downtown by public transit.
5. teXXas (server is currently down) – TV program information – specific for Germany, free
   I don’t need a printed TV guide anymore, since I have this app installed :-)

Of course the standard applications Mail, Maps, and Phone are also in daily use :-)

Which apps do you use on a (nearly) daily basis?

Mixed Sunday

Some things that got my attention lately:

• DIY Planner released an app (Windows and Mac) to customize their templates
  Their templates are the best thing you can use, if you choose to do GTD on paper
• Twitter:
• Twittastic
  Twitter desktop app: Windows only, based on .NET
  Looks promising, but it’s a very early release – they call it “bleeder” (instead of alpha/beta…)
• great article from Chris Brogan: How I use Twitter at Volume
• great introduction to Twitter: A User's Guide to Twittering
• The vulnerability of Twitter – since there are so many apps for Twitter out there, you are tempted to give your password to many, many third parties
• Phishing (Chris Pirillo), Phishing (Mashable)
• “Bad” startup: Twply (Techchrunch)
• Browser: I have a very hard time sticking to my current favorite browser: Google Chrome. I’m desperately missing some extensions and I’m thinking about using Chrome and Firefox simultaneously.

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and my public bookmarks on Diigo or del.icio.us

Mixed

Some things that got my attention lately:

• I’m currently a very active Twitter user – sending tweets is so much simpler than writing blog posts ;-)
• Books, books, books. What do I plan to read in 2009? I definitely want to read more “real books”, rather than online news, online articles…
  That’s why I wrote the article about the most recommended books in 2008.
  Especially I’m still waiting for my copy of David Allen’s new book.
• Personal Productivity and Personal Knowledge Management
  this is not only the main theme for this blog but also part of my daily work and my main hobby. I’m constantly looking for new things to integrate into my current tool set and presentation/workshop files.
  A lot of my favorite blogs have written 2008 summaries and I’m planning to go through the most of them and reread a lot of their materials.

IPod Shuffle arrived

Since I’m an Advanced Insider on Qype, I received today my gift from them: a new IPod Shuffle :-)

 

No unboxing photos available – since I don’t need it (I have an IPhone 3G, my girl friend an IPhone), so I will give it to a good friend of us (which is still using an IPod of the 2nd generation).

If I get more readers on my blog, the next free gift for me will be a price for my followers – so stay tuned :-)

Waiting For: David Allen – Making it all work

Since today officially available in Germany – but not on stock currently

I will post as soon as the book arrived and after I completed it :-)
Small teaser:

• Test Your GTD IQ
• BNet – Preview: What kind of Self-Manager are You?