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!

Comments

[Bob]

cheers, good tip.

[Andy]

These are great ideas to grab info for viewing on the run, but it seems that the iPod is rather clunky nowadays with having to download info compared to Wifi and EVDO on so many current portable devices. The iPhone with iPod/internet combo is coming not a minute too soon.

[Dale Cruse]

You addressed Facebook and Twitter, but what about Flickr, as seen in your image?

[Steve Rubel]

Dale, same as Facebook. Set up your alerts, filter them put them in a feed and send them to your iPod.

[Daniel Robitaille]

Interesting tips. But it was a bit strange to look at my name and a picture of myself in that Twitter screenshot :)

[Wired Dude]

another les intrusive option is to use alerts.yahoo.com to subscribe to the once-per-day update of your twitter updates and follow through with the rest of the instructions. but all your twitters for a day are in one email.

[Eric Reid]

That really is a neat idea. I think if I lived in a city with more public transportation, I'd do it - I just spend too much time driving and not enough time standing still.

I tell you though, the moment someone comes up with the iPod utility to read text like a HAL 9000, tweaks like this will be unbelievably handy.

[engtech]

I was really surprised that Facebook didn't provide an RSS feed with that info.

I wish Yahoo Pipes had email-in and email-out (other than alerts).

I really hate how the email-out (in Pipes) contains unsubscribe information, because otherwise you could pipe something like this into a blog-by-email application and have a webpage of it all.

[ashok]

This is a great site which is relevant u r site.,which deals with mp3, Audiobook, Audio book, Ipod, Audio and all kinds of info.this ipod can store songs,bata . we can listen to them when we require. this is used as a external memoryi can suggest u the relavent site ie.
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