28 November 2009

What I want (social media consumption edition)


I'm just sort of thinking out loud here. Different forms of communication, right? Too freakin' many. Currently, I consume the following forms of electronic communication:

PUSH:
  • Phone calls (cell, Tina's cell [= home], work)
  • SMS messages
  • Email (Gmail, work)
  • IM (AIM, Gtalk, Facebook; maybe Yahoo, MSwhatever, ICQ if anybody else cared)
  • Facebook notifications
  • Twitter (DM's, @mentions)
  • LinkedIn notifications
  • Notifications from various Nings
  • Yammer (could change to Pull if volume increased)

PULL:
  • RSS feeds
  • Facebook news feed
  • Twitter stream(s)
  • Non-Push activity on various other social nets, like LinkedIn and Nings

Then there are communications from myself - Calendar events, Evernote and reQall items, etc., - which could be lumped in above - but those aren't really my problem. Communication with other people is my problem.

So here's what I want:
  • For the Push items, I want to be alerted when they come in. I want alerts on both my laptop and my iPhone. I want each type of alert to sound different from the other kinds, and include a popup with some useful info and the ability to jump to the appropriate app for more info/response. I want to be able to easily turn off or snooze these alerts, and put them in silent mode.
  • For the Pull items, I don't want to be alerted when new ones come in, but it would be groovy if something (on both my desktop and iPhone) would count them up for me, and let me know how many are waiting for me at any given time, without me having to ask it to check.
  • For the Pull items, I would pay money - srsly - for something which would detect cross-posting and show me items only once, even if they were posted to both Twitter and FB, or both FB and RSS, f'rinstance. And, ideally, this would allow me to easily respond to a cross-posted item on the platform of my choosing (i.e., if it was posted on both Twitter and FB, I should be able to jump to either one to reply/comment).

That stuff would make me (a little) healthier, wealthier, and wiser when it comes to my info overload and Chronic Partial Attention syndrome, I think. I'm edging ever closer to it, by screwing around with a wide variety of notification apps, etc., for both platforms I use (PC and iPhone). But I'm still a ways away, especially on that third bullet on consolidating cross-posts. If y'all run across tools that make this stuff easier, let me know? Thanks!

image by Saumya Agarwal (rights)

3 comments:

Liz said...

I don't understand why folks do so much cross posting. I mean once in a while I could understand. But it seems to me that each platform has a certain type of feeling about it and a slightly different set of friends / followers / links/ whatevers and I want to share different things with different groups. Cross posting nearly everything seems very limiting to me and I don't get it...

Anonymous said...

Mike, it seems to me that you may need to embrace the emerging technology organizer called the "listening platform." This is what my business partner has developed in Ruby on Rails -- it's our 2nd generation of Cell Alert and I have high hopes for it... but this stuff is so new it's not even on Wikipedia. In fact, Forrester.com coined th term. It basically the google wave meets TIVO-like web filtering and channel monitoring. See this report: http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/wave%26trade%3B_listening_platforms%2C_q1_2009/q/id/48093/t/2

Mike Croghan said...

Did you just seriously suggest I see a report that costs ONE THOUSAND, SEVEN HUNDRED, FORTY NINE DOLLARS to read?

Dude.