Ian Anderson Gray

Do you have multiple social media accounts? I admit I am a bit of a social media junky. I can’t seem to resist signing up for the latest craze. Amongst the accounts I have accounts with are Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla, Foursquare, Audioboo, Soundcloud and Flickr.

How on earth do you organise yourself amongst so many accounts? Well, unfortunately I have to admit I am nowhere near organised. One might say ditch the lot and live in pre-internet bliss. The thought occasionally crosses my mind, but the internet and social media are here to stay. They also have many advantages.

• Flickr. The famous photo sharing website. I’ve been a pro user for years and years. I’ve been using it as a backup service for all my photos. To begin with I just uploaded EVERYTHING to Flickr so I had an extra backup of every photo. The problem is that having to tag every photo you take is just so time consuming. Also having over 3000 photos on there quickly becomes unmanageable. As I use Syncplicity to back up my files to the cloud and sync back to all my other computers (I even backup my laptop’s files to the cloud using Carbonite too) I don’t really need to use Flickr as a backup tool anymore. I’m just going to use it to share my best photos publicly and the occasional family photo with my Flickr friends. As for my personal shots and videos (ones that I don’t want to appear publically) I’ll use Facebook.
• Facebook – I tend to have pretty high privacy settings on Facebook and I only add friends there who are actually my friends (sorry, but you can follow me on Twitter for that!). Facebook’s photo tool is now pretty advanced (in some ways better than Flickr’s) and it’s a great way of sharing photos and videos with all your friends. Photos are now high resolution and you can tag them so that your friends know when you’ve posted a pic of them. I don’t post all my photos and videos here, but I do try and post ones that are good and relevant to my friends.
• Twitter -I signed up to Twitter fairly near the beginning (in 2006) but I wasn’t an avid user, basically as I didn’t own an iPhone. My phone at the time was a Windows Mobile 6 (ouch) and didn’t have a Twitter client. I mainly used it on the web and using SMS. Then Twitter ditched text messages in the UK and I pretty much ditched it for a while. However, I did come back and now I am a heavy user. It’s a fantastic resource where I share links with people, ask questions and follow interesting people that although I don’t know personally we have something in common. I have one main Twitter account but I have quite a few other accounts which I will be using for more specific Tweets. For example I’ve created accounts for my singing teaching, web business, and myself as a singer, as well as accounts for my area, for my weather station (when I get round to installing it) and for a few other ideas that I have brewing! I’ve got my Pinboard account (a bookmarking application like Delicious) adding Tweets whenever I bookmark a site (I use a cool web app called ifttt.com for this) Hopefully I’ll get round to writing about how I use Twitter in another blog post.
• Audioboo – Audioboo isn’t perfect, but I love the idea (and the name). It allows you to record mini audio messages, blogs or “boos” using your phone or computer. In some ways I prefer speaking (writing blog posts doesn’t always come naturally to me) and this is a great way of sharing content. I have my audioboo account linked to Twitter and Facebook and I hope to add this to my blog too. I’ve made a few boos so far including my talking about coffee, cooking sweet and sour tofu and talking live from a Bridgewater Hall concert. I must do more! There is a 5 minute limit, although if you are nice to them they can increase this!
• Soundcloud - Not too dissimilar to Audioboo in that it lets you record audio from your phone and the web and share it on multiple social networks. Soundcloud is more about creating sounds and music. It has a cool widget thing that you can plonk on your website, and people can post comments at certain points along the timeline. I haven’t used it much, but I’ll be using this to share music and strange sounds that I come across!
• Foursquare and Gowalla - I’ve put these two networks together as they are very similar. They are two of the most popular location social networks. They allow you to share your location with your friends and you can also upload photos and other information. I’ll post more about these in the future, but you should definitely check them out. I prefer Gowalla in that it has a much nice interface, better Android app and also syncs with Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook places.

So that’s it! Do check these out. If you have any ideas on how to organise your social networks please do let me know in the comments!

Just a quick introductory post which I hope to follow up later in more detail. The Internet is so much more rich than it was 10 years ago thanks to the proliferation of “web apps” or web applications. A few (and I hesitate to use the phrase) have been life changing ones, well at least they have helped me be more productive and focused. I thought I’d list a few here and leave another future post to go into them in more detail. I am also listing some pieces of software that aren’t quite what you’d call web apps, but they use the internet to function.

• Dropbox – Most people have heard of Dropbox which synchronizes all files and folders within a special folder on your computer called “Dropbox”. You can install this folder on multiple computers and all files are kept up to date. It even keeps previous file versions. I’m not so evangelistic as others about it as the free version only gives you 2Gb (although you can increase this by various methods- I have over 3Gb). Also it only syncs the dropbox folder (not other folders on your computer)- again there is a hack to get Dropbox to sync more folders but I’m not that keen. And of course there have been all those privacy concerns…
• Syncplicity – This app has been fantastic and basically addresses a lot of the issues I have with Dropbox. It syncs multiple computers and I have almost 100Gb of stuff! It syncs multiple folders (Documents, music, photos and videos etc) and keeps previous file versions. In terms of cost it’s cheaper than the paid-for version of Dropbox (at least it is for me as an old customer). I haven’t always been impressed with the customer service, and not so sure about the new editions they have brought out, but it’s definitely worth checking out.
• Remember the Milk – I’ve had an account for years, but only recently have I used this properly. The reason that I have only used it fully recently is because I have an Android phone and they have released an app for it. Remember the Milk is a “to do” list on steroids, and really comes it to it’s own when you can use it on the move.
• Last Pass – A cloud based password manager. Yes, there have been major security concerns recently, but I still have confidence in their set up. You only need to have one password (make sure it’s a strong one though) and you can store all your passwords securely. You can even get Last Pass to generate really complicated ones. It works on and offline on all major browsers. If you pay for a pro account you can use it on your mobile (iPhone and Android) and the cool thing is that it works offline on that too. This was very helpful when I needed something when I had no mobile signal in the middle of nowhere
• ifttt – Currently in an invite-only beta. ifttt stands for “If This then That” and basically allows you to update certain channels when certain things happen. Examples of ifttt channels include Youtube, Delicious, Twitter and Weather. For example if the temperature in your town goes above a certain point you could get it to Tweet a message, or if you add a bookmark to Delicious you can get Twitter to tweet the link. I’ll post more on this one another time.
• Pinboard – I used Delicious for many years, but after Yahoo announced they weren’t interested in it I looked for alternatives. After a brief spell with Diigo, I came across Pinboard. It’s not free, but it’s well worth the money. The developer and owner of Pinboard is constantly working on it and if you pay $25 per year for the archiving account you can get Pinboard to save a copy of each page in your bookmarks. This is fantastic as many pages stop working after a while due to the site going down, changing hands or ceasing to exist.

Well, that’s it for now. I may post another Fantastic Apps post (perhaps Fantastic Apps II!) at some point, but I hope you’ve found that helpful.

OK, I don’t own an iPhone, and I’m the not the greatest Apple fan. However, I think the iPhone is the right phone for some people as it is easy to use and intuitive. A friend of mine bought a new iPhone from the Carphone Warehouse and unfortunately their Geek Squad weren’t able to sort out this issue. So I turned to t’internet to seek out what the issue could be. The issue was that when she deleted a message the iPhone reported an error saying “Unable to move message. The message could not be moved to the mailbox trash.”- not terribly helpful. The same issue was happening with the sent mail with an equally unhelpful “Unable to move message. The message could not be moved to the mailbox sent.”

Well, lucklily I found the answer on the macrumors forum, and it’s a bit of a “kick the TV” type of fix. Here is the link. Basically you need to press the trash button or the sent button in the advanced settings EVEN THOUGH it’s checked. Weird. Anyway, it worked for us, and my friend is very happy. Here are the steps:

1. Open Settings
2. Click on mail, contacts, calenders
3. Click on your email accounty
4. Click on advanced
5. Click on Deleted Mailbox (or sent or drafts depending on the problem folder)
6. Click the “trash” (or sent or drafts) button under “on my iphone” even though its already checked.