Tag Archives: Google Reader

Twitter and #racistpool

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I’m happy with recent Twitter integration, but not exactly thrilled with how it has come about.  If you don’t already know about the latest shame of the city, here’s an excellent video posted on Philebrity, and The Inquirer has more conventional coverage.  Philebrity tracked the progress of the story as it spread outside of the local interest by, in part, reviewing the comments posted on Twitter.  So, as I watched the story spread over the course of the day, I saw how people communicated, a little bit of how the @ and # symbols are used, and how a story can spread exponentially.

Currently, I’m tracking (not the pool story, but) lots of Phillies stuff, some music stuff, a few friends and some political things.  It’s a little like the Google Reader, but I’m able to tolerate higher volume because the content is so light – the fabled 140 characters.  With Google Reader, it’s hard not to get sucked in.  Even if the site’s feed is abbreviated, I still can’t help but wonder what I’m missing.  With Twitter, I’m actually seeing the whole thing, because that’s all there is.

I take it back…

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ReadAir sucks.  I’m going to stick with Google Reader until there is some native app that (a) notifies me when I have new items to look at, and (b)  syncs with Google Reader so that I don’t have ‘unread’ items to look at if I check online from another machine.

It was a good idea, but it didn’t update, it didn’t hide cleanly, it was just too tough.

Adobe Air to the rescue

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air_appicon

I find that, more and more, I depend on rss (or Atom, or xml, or whatever) tp deal with the net.  I like for content providers to tell me when they have something to say, and I don’t want to bother with tweets or Facebook.  I wasvery happy with NetNewsWire, a native application that sat in the dock and and showed the number of unread messages as things got updated.  The problem was that there was no way to read news on a mobile device – I had to have the computer.

I set up a ‘Reader’ account through Gmail, but that created two problems.  Firstly, I had to surf over to Reader in order to see what’s new.  Second, between NetNewswire and Google Reader, I was basically getting two notifications for each news item.  When that’s spread over 20+ subscriptions, that’s inbox overload.

Adobe to the rescue.  Adobe Air is a developer tool that lets web apps run on the computer like they would on the iPhone or iPod Touch.  ReadAir required me to download Air from Adobe and then download the reader app.  It works just like the NetNewswire native app, but it syncs with Google Reader – even to the point of delivery settings and folder management.  Plus, it displays the number of unread messages on the ap icon in the dock.  Problem solved.