Fragmented Tech

TrackThis is a small project that has been in my notebook of ideas for awhile, and I finally started working on it during the past couple weekends. It’s a simple Twitter service that allows you to track FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL over Twitter.

After following the @trackthis bot, send it a direct message with the tracking code and a nickname for the package (ex. 123456789123 Macbook Air). Then any time your package changes location the bot will send you a direct message like:

Depending on how your account is set up, you can get the updates over email, IM or SMS (IM and SMS both have a “Direct Messages only” option). For the complete instructions (there isn’t really more to it) head over here. If there’s any problems/questions just contact me.

I’ve seen a lot of new Twitter services being brought to my attention in the past couple of days. Three of them seemed very interesting, since they all help with gathering information through the Twitter network.

ChaCha Launches Twitter Service

ChaCha, a service where humans answer your questions via SMS, also operates on Twitter. Send your question to @ChaCha and a human guide will respond with an answer and URL. ChaCha is best for finding out small factoids, scores of a game, etc. If you’re looking for some user feedback or recommendations, the next two services will be more useful. This service seems most useful for information on the go, since a quick Google search is probably faster. Read more info about the service.

@Answerme, It’s Like Yahoo Answers for Twitter

I first saw @answerme mentioned a couple days ago and is similar to an idea that I was working on. The tool provides a way for you to ask a question to a larger audience than just your followers. After sending a message to @answerme the question will be posted on the website, and re-tweeted on the account. Any Twitter user can reply to your question by sending a message like “@answerme @pb30 The Mac is superior.” The person who asked the question can then pick a winner. See the complete instructions for more.

PollDaddy Launches Twitter Polls

PollDaddy recently launched Twitter Polls, an easy way to create a poll and post it to your Twitter account. There’s no real special functionality here. But all the configuration is on one page and it doesn’t require a PollDaddy account.

I often hear that the power of Twitter is the ability to find high quality information fast. However this often comes from the A-listers who have thousands of followers. It’s nice to see some tools to even out the playing field.

I recently wanted one page that I can send people to where they can find my presence on the web. I’ve been linking to FriendFeed but I wanted to set one up that I had more control over. I decided to make on on Netvibes, you can see it here. I was recently asked how I made it, so here’s the process.

First you’ll need a Netvibes account and you’ll need access to their latest version, Ginger. Once you are signed up, you can add widgets to your private page. In order for the world to see it, you’ll need to switch to your public universe page.

Once you are on your universe page, click the ‘Add content’ button in the upper left. The ‘Essential Widgets’ area contains most of the useful widgets you will want to use.

Here’s what I’m currently using:

• Link Widget: Generates a link and thumbnail to whatever page you want. I use this to link to all my other social profiles (Twitter, Digg, etc)
• Instant Messaging Widgets: Display your IM screennames using the Skype, Yahoo, Live, AIM, Gtalk or ICQ widgets
• Twitter Widget: Displays my Twitter feed. Simple enough.

There’s also widgets for Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and many other popular sites. There’s even a Wall widget similar to Facebook’s wall feature. Once the widgets are added you can change the title bar color using the dropdown on each widget.

Once you’ve customized it to your liking, you’ve got a single page to link to when promoting yourself that is under your control and doesn’t require web hosting.

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I’m currently subscribed to around 70 RSS feeds, which can definitely get overwhelming. One tool that has helped fend off the information overload is AideRSS. This is a great service that filters out the less important or less popular stories from any blog feed. It has really changed a lot of my RSS feeds, especially for big, active sites.

AideRSS looks at a given RSS feed and ranks each of their posts. It looks at the amount of attention a post is getting and compares it to other posts from the same blog. Each post is assigned a number, known as PostRank. The PostRank is calculated by looking at comments on the post, if it was posted to Digg or del.icio.us and how many other blogs link to that post. AideRSS then gives you five options for new feeds: All posts, Good posts (any post that scored over a 3), Great posts (over 5), Best posts (over 6) and the Top 20.

AideRSS works best with larger sites where users are commenting and other blogs are linking to them. Smaller sites will just have a very low PostRank for each post and may be slightly skewed by a bunch of spam comments or other factors. The one downside of the service that I’ve found is that it delivery of new items can be a bit delayed. So if you check your RSS frequently expect to get AideRSS feeds in chunks rather than a slow trickle.

They also recently announced an AideRSS Firefox Extension that integrates with Google Reader (currently in private beta). The extension adds the PostRank score to each blog post as well as some of social statistics for each post. Check out their video for more:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdJKA2o1tww]

I’d definitely recommend trying out AideRSS on some of your feeds. If you start using it (or some other filtering system) let me know what you think in the comments.

Like this post? Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get more like it! I’ll be posting more of my favorite tools over the next couple weeks.