Track Your Social Network Using Your iPod

After my last series on Gmail, many people have told me that they love it when I blog about the little tips and tricks I use to make my life easier and to become a smarter marketer. I may explore this area some more on this blog. I don't ever plan to rival Lifehacker, but rather complement what they do.

Here's a cool tip. It's another way that I use Gmail as a nerve center. Did you know you can keep up with your Facebook or Twitter friends using Gmail, RSS and your iPod? It's easy and I love being able to scan these when I am on the go.

Here's what you need to do. First, let's tackle Facebook. Log into Facebook and set your email preferences. Here you can customize your notifications - e.g. when someone adds you as a friend, writes on your wall, etc.

Next, set up a filter in Gmail that takes all messages from facebookmail.com, archives them and applies them with a filter - e.g. "Peeps." Then generate an RSS feed for the label. It will look something like https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/peeps. I will explain the iPod part in a bit.

OK that covers Facebook. For Twitter you have two paths.

Option one, log onto to Twitter and find the RSS feed for your friends. It's at the bottom of your home page. Simple enough. You're ready to advance to the next step.

Option two offers greater flexibility in that it uses Gmail to create a searchable "Twitterbase" of your friends' tweets. Simply take your Twitter feed and run it through an RSS-to-email service like R-mail so that you get all of your updates in Gmail. Then, apply the process outlined above for Facebook so that all your updates are in one place and in one feed.

Next, you need a special utility that will put your feeds on your iPod. For the Mac there's iFeedPod. For Windows there's iGadget. Now all you need to do is add the feed to that reader and have it sync to your iPod and voila, you have a way to keep up with your friends on the go! The updates will appear in the notes folder of your iPod.

By the way, this works for any social network that sends out email alerts or has feed capabilities built right in!