One of the things I’ve been lamenting about twitter is that it’s replaced del.icio.us as the “place where I put interesting links” … ie. links my friends might be interested in. This means that I don’t really have a good, structured repository of links like I used to have with delicious. The problem is that twitter and delicious do a similar thing - let you share information - from a totally different philosophical starting point.
Delicious is a database designed to collect and organize URLs, which you can also share.
Twitter is a conversational tool, that also allows you to share URLs.
So delicious is built as an organizable archive; while twitter is built as an ephemeral transmission device.
But what I’ve found is that I want to do both: transmit interesting links, but *also* archive them for future reference. So I want to link the two services. I asked on Twitter if anyone knew how; Jordan (blog - twitter) pointed me to twitticious (review), by Alex Girard which, I think, does exactly what I want, unfortunately with some problems, but the meat of what I want twitticious does:
1. I post a URL to twitter, with a bit of text
2. twitticious then sends that post to delicious, with the twit text as the title, and the URL as the URL
I now am able to transmit my twits, and archive the URLs in a nicely structured/able database.
It’s so simple. And all you have to do to get it to work is:
-give twitticious your twitter name
-give twitticious your delicious name/password (hopefully notprobably too much of a security threat).
Problem 1: the delicious entries aren’t tagged, so you have to do that in a separate step.
Potential Solution: have twitticious automatically tag: “from:twitter” … so I can easily find & tag those entries
Problem 2: twitticious uses the twitter’s tinyurl as the URL it posts to delicious
Potential solution: could the true URL be extracted and posted instead?
Problem 3: Apparently it can’t be turned off
Potential Solution: you could just change your delicious pw, and that should do the trick, I think.
UPDATE: Problem 4: The password thing. Probably too much of a security threat.
Potential solution: I don’t know.
(PS what do you think gives the CIA more information: my Facebook account or my del.icio.us account?)
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July 8, 2008 at 12:24 pm
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April 9, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Boris Anthony
1- you are not lamenting twitter or delicious. you are whining about your own behavior and usage of those services.
2- you are whining about one service not doing the job of the other service, hence forgetting “small pieces loosely joined”
3- you are seeking to commit that most horrid social network act of cross posting your “content” across multiple services, effectively spamming all your friends, across contexts. (assuming, as many who don’t get it do, that if I follow your tweets I *must* want to see yur bookmarks and your blog posts and your presence information and your pictures and and and and… get a facebook account why don’t you? ;p
where does it end Hugh McGuire, where does it end?
;)
April 9, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Hugh
1. yes; I am also seeking a hack/tool that will address my usage desires, which I think is usually the base principle of design, right? to make useful things that help people do the things they want/need to do?
2. no, i am whining about wanting to do both things at once. i am wishing to join those loose pieces. i want to archive my linked URLs in a structured way, without having to do everything twice.
3. i suspect you are the only person who (might) follow both my delicious & my twits. i use delicious more for myself; twitter more for friends. if that leads you to de-friend me in one or the other or both, then all the better for you if that’s a better use for you, of my online time.
to repeat, generally i’m using twitter to communicate and delicious to archive (for myself). I want to be able to do both at once, instead of having to do both separately. Is that so wrong? so the impulse on the delicious side has nothing to do with wanting to better “broadcast” myself in social networks, but only to better use (for myself) that which I am broadcasting.
and I think that’s where it ends.
I worry Boris, that you don’t understand how people wish to use these tools, because that’s not how you want to use them ;-)
August 19, 2008 at 11:53 am
Tri Nguyen
Try the Mahalo Follow extension for Firefox. When you use it to post a link to Mahalo, it lets you tag the content, describe it in 100 characters, and cross-post it to a few key web services. I typically post to Delicious and Twitter! The only problem? Recently I’ve had trouble getting it to post (perhaps some congestion at Mahalo’s end).