Stayin’ Connected

Since I’ve been blog­ging for, gosh, over ten years now in var­i­ous forms and at var­i­ous URLs, I’m hip to the var­i­ous ways to post and get infor­ma­tion: blogs, rss, tweets, sta­tus updates, etc, and I long ago fell in love with a Mac appli­ca­tion called Net­NewsWire, one of the first best RSS read­ers. I’ve got thou­sands of web­site feeds in my sub­scrip­tion list and can skim them all in a man­ner of min­utes if nec­es­sary. For me, how­ever, NNW didn’t make the tran­si­tion to iPhone app very well (I’ve had slow and buggy expe­ri­ences with it). NNW was bought out by News­Ga­tor sev­eral years ago and now syncs your lists between devices with Google Reader (this is a good thing). NNW for Mac is still a fab­u­lous appli­ca­tion and well worth an invest­ment. But for stay­ing con­nected with all the lat­est infor­ma­tion while on the go, my new favorite RSS reader for iPhone is Reeder.

The Reeder app is fast (even with thou­sands of feeds), has a pleas­ing min­i­mal inter­face, and really killer func­tion­al­ity! It can take any inter­est­ing link and make a note, share it, post it to deli­cious, save it to instapa­per (more on that in a minute), tweet it, open it in safari, and copy/mail links/articles as well. And more. The expe­ri­ence is, as I said, fast and sleek and sim­ple yet with enough power to do what­ever you wish. It, too, syncs up with your Google Reader account keep­ing every­thing up to date between devices.

If you like a more glossy expe­ri­ence with your news and updates, you’ll want to con­sider using the new Pulse app, espe­cially if you are mainly now using an iPad (it works the same on the iPhone, but the smaller screen makes it feel cramped). Pulse is a visu­ally pleas­ing pre­sen­ta­tion of your feeds (but is lim­ited to 20 of your favorites) so you’ll want to use it for the stuff you like to spend a lit­tle more time reading.

For cre­at­ing and catch­ing up on your var­i­ous tweet streams, I can highly rec­om­mend Twit­terific for iPhone/iPad. There are plenty of other apps for tweet­ing (even one just for writ­ing tweets, Bird­house), but I’ve never felt lack­ing with the design or fea­ture set of Twit­terific. It just works, with mul­ti­ple accounts, and it looks darn nice. The offi­cial Twit­ter iPhone app is nice, too, and free.

On the desk­top side of things, I’m a big fan of Seesmic. Oth­ers might rec­om­mend Tweet­Deck, but for me Seesmic fits my style and has all the expected fea­tures of mul­ti­ple accounts, searches, hash­tags, retweet­ing, URL short­en­ing and the like. Works pretty well and the price is right (free).

But lately, what with the mul­ti­ple social media accounts that I man­age or am involved with, I’ve desired some­thing a lit­tle more pow­er­ful and found it in Hoot­Suite. Because I’ve got my personal/business account (@tweak), my other busi­ness account (@viewville) and my fea­ture film project (@triumph67film) as well as the var­i­ous Face­book pages that go along with those, I needed a tool that could han­dle them all as well as do sched­uled post­ings for future dates/times. Hoot­Suite does all this and more (includ­ing man­ag­ing your other team mem­bers and assign­ing tweets to them)! And while their com­pan­ion iPhone app does cost a few bucks (now free!), hav­ing all those fea­tures in my pocket means I can more quickly and effi­ciently man­age my var­i­ous social media accounts when I’ve got a spare minute here and there.
Oh, and instapa­per. Well, this is one ser­vice you’ve just got to try. It’ll take your inter­est­ing links you come across and save them for later so you can flag a long story and have it all ready to go when you actu­ally have the time to dig into a longer arti­cle. Sim­ple, easy to use.

PS — this entire post (and most of them, in fact) was cre­ated using MarsEdit.