Being able to organize the people you follow on Twitter into groups/categories/lists (whatever you want to call them) is one of the most useful ways to help process the flood of information that is shared via microblogging. I have lists for people at work, for family, for friends, etc. and this enables me to reads tweets in a way to works well for me. Up until Twitter's recent introduction of lists, each client (TweetDeck, Seesmic, and others) handled lists in their own way, meaning you had to recreate your groups in each tool. Now that Lists are a core feature of Twitter, they can be centrally managed and used across a variety of different Twitter clients.
Since I've not seen a "TweetDeck Group to Twitter List" conversion tool, what I've been doing is running columns side by side, one for the TweetDeck group I've been using, and a second for the new Twitter list I will be replacing it with. Visual inspection allows me to see when someone is missing from the Twitter list, and I then click on the person's photo, choose User - Add to group/list, and then select the Twitter list I want to add them to. After a few days of doing this, I had most of my new Twitter lists matching my old TweetDeck groups, and I was able to remove the TweetDeck columns. Now I can use those Twitter lists in several of the popular Twitter clients.
Ideally in the future Twitter profiles, along with Facebook, LinkedIn, and whatever cool tools pop-up in 2010+ will support industry standards which allow information to be shared not just across clients for the same tool, but even across different platforms. For example, I have a group in my Apple Address Book called "Toronto Tech Friends", which I use to send emails. Wouldn't it be nice if I could also have that same group be a list in Twitter, and a list in Facebook? Imagine being able to add someone in one place, and have them added to the others at the same time. Now that would be useful.
Lotus Notes Mail - The Gems And The Warts
Tue, Aug 31st 2010 10:00a Alan Lepofsky Every time I hear some "2.0 evangelist" sing the praises of Gmail my stomach churns a little, my heartbeat quickens and my face tenses as I ponder what could have been if more attention had been paid to the Notes UI years ago. I both enjoy and hate giving the "Lotus Notes did that a decade ago" speech. I enjoy it because I like showing people that these awesome new features are neither new nor innovative. I hate it because it reinforces how IBM was never successful in getting people to like u [read] Keywords: admin
ibm
lotus
notes
rich text
desktop
eclipse
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Firefox 4 You Had Me At Organize Into Groups
Thu, Aug 26th 2010 10:10p Alan Lepofsky A few days ago FireFox 4 Beta 4 introduced "Panorama" which allows you to group tabs together and switch back and forth between different sets. You can manually do this today with FF3 by having multiple windows open, but this new ability to create the groups and see a visual representation has already greatly improved my web experience. I've created groups for "things I'm doing right now", "email, calendar and social media stuff", "articles to read later", "future to-dos", etc. The UI e [read] Keywords: email
firefox
Understanding The Pecking Order
Thu, Aug 5th 2010 8:30a Alan Lepofsky I'm happy to see Twitter gets the hierarchy right. Now if only my account was verified to prove I'm the real Alan Lepofsky. Thanks for the image Volker [read] Keywords: twitter
The Greatest Vacation Ever
Tue, Jul 20th 2010 11:30p Alan Lepofsky Go to http://www.gapadventures.com , under Region you'll see GAP is offering some pretty awesome destinations, Far Far Away... Packing for both Tatooine and Hoth on the same trip is going to be tough. [read] Keywords:
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Calling All Developers. Extend Enterprise Applications With Social Features
Mon, Jul 19th 2010 9:50a Alan Lepofsky Are you looking to extend your application development knowledge to include open internet technologies such as JSON, WebHooks, Activitystrea.ms and PubSubHubbub? Would you like to help your company or your customers by integrating existing enterprise systems with today's "2.0" social technologies? Are you free next Wed? If you answered yes to any or all of the above, then join us Wed July 21st at 9:30 PST for Integrating Enterprise Applications with Socialtext. Members of our Eng [read] Keywords: application
applications
development
enterprise
integration
Firefox 4 Option For Tabs On Top, Like Lotus Notes
Sat, Jul 10th 2010 10:40a Alan Lepofsky I've been hearing a lot this week about how Firefox 4 will be providing an option to put tabs at the top of the screen. Well, once again Notes which is always slagged for its UI was ahead of the curve. All kidding aside, this is a good video about UI design: [read] Keywords: lotus
notes
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