COMPUTER WORLD

Dear Alice,

If you are interested in getting some organisation happening with all your social media apps, then one of the solutions below could well be for you. I should add this isn’t meant to be a definitive review of these two free products but merely some basic information based on my experience to date.

Netvibes
NetVibes is the solution Teacher Mum suggested you try. She suggested I did too and having used it for a week now, I do think it’s pretty good. For an organised person like you Alice, I’m sure you’ll quickly wonder how you ever did without it. Basically Netvibes is a free web site (so not a download) that lets you personalise your web experience. You can put everything that matters to you, newspapers, blogs, weather, email, photos, social networks, podcasts etc. all together on one single page in any browser. Then, and here’s the thing, the page automatically updates every time you open it and becomes your control centre or communications hub for all your social media. You can select it as your home page and whenever you access the web you are immediately alerted to ‘what’s new’ in your world. With everyone in the family now seemingly writing a blog, being able to see instantly who’s posted and who’s not, makes it worthwhile on it’s own. You can of course still search Google from here and continue to use your browser as you would for other things.

Flock
You may however like to try Flock as a comparison. I’m trialling this as well and I like it a lot. It’s not just a web page but a whole standalone browser. As such, it does all this social media managing stuff, but in a much more integrated way. You can even use it as your blog editor and upload images to flickr etc. It integrates directly with Facebook, Webmail, Digg, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, twitter, WordPress, Blogger, Delicious, Bebo, TypePad, Picasa, and more (full list here). One slight negative for you and other Hotmail users though, is that when I say it integrates with Webmail, sadly this does not currently include Hotmail. You can of course still use Hotmail in Flock just like you already do in your present web browser, but it just won’t be integrated into ‘My World’ as it’s called. The reason for this is that Hotmail is Microsoft and they haven’t made the data connection to their service available like Gmail, Yahoo and AOL all have. Having tried the mail feature though using my Gmail account, I can tell you the integration is very cute and personally if you like Flock, I’d change my email address to a Gmail one just to be able to use it. ‘missalice<yourname> is available in either Gmail or Yahoo if you’re interested. You can still keep your Hotmail one until no-one uses it anymore of course. I know you don’t currently use twitter much, but if you do start doing so, Flock is the perfect environment for that too. Check out this video which explains how in their words “Flock is about to become the way to tweet”.

Enjoy!

Techno : Dad