For the past few weeks I have been using Digsby, a smart Trillian-style multi-protocol IM client. I’ve tried such programs before — Trillian, Pidgin and Meebo — but for one reason or another they all annoyed me. For this reason, before Digsby I stuck to having MSN, Google Talk and Skype all open at once.

Digsby is quite cool because not only does it unite your IM accounts but it throws in your email and social networking accounts as well. So updates from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace sit alongside your buddy list. Neat stuff. I believe support for more social networks is in the pipeline too.

Having said that, the Twitter features leave a lot to be desired. I have since started using Twhirl which I think is fantastic, save for the fact that it doesn’t open automatically when my computer starts up.

Beforehand I updated Twitter using Google Talk. But once I installed Twhirl I switched IM Twitter updates off because of course I was getting duplicate messages. But even then the problem of duplicate (or triplicate) messages did not go away. It got me thinking about the increasing trend for stuff people publish on one website to be automatically re-published elsewhere.

A lot of people I know use a Facebook application called TwitterSync. I am among them because I was screaming out for Facebook to allow this for a long time. The app automatically updates your Facebook status with your latest Twitter tweet.

This is cool because enlightened people know how great Twitter is, but there are so many more people on Facebook who do not use Twitter but could still benefit from the wise words you post on Twitter. The Facebook status is the ideal way to give your Twitter account a wider audience.

But what about those people who are friends with me on both Facebook and Twitter? They get the status updates twice. This was not so annoying beforehand. But because Digsby is hooked up to Facebook and Twitter, I get two little pop-ups telling me all about it — and this is in addition to Twhirl’s alerts.

This reminded me of a post written by Robin Hamman a couple of weeks ago. He asked, “is auto-feeding links to Twitter spammy?”

Then I came across a website called Tweet Clouds. This site produces a word cloud or heatmap of the words you use on Twitter. Three words tower above all the others: New. Blog. Post. Those three words appear at the start of each automatically generated tweet advising followers that I have just published something on my blog.

I do quite like it when people alert their followers on Twitter to the fact that they have just published a blog post. I think other people like it as well. I have just checked and over the past year Twitter has been this blog’s fifth highest referrer, bringing 888 visits. That is above Google Search and Google Search UK (although below Google Image Search and Google Image Search UK).

If you take out search engines and blog aggregators, Twitter is the second-biggest referrer to this blog (the biggest being Times Online’s blog platform, which is concentrated on just a few posts). Remember that this does not even include those who are visiting from the Twitter stream in their IM client or another application.

I often also click through when a new blog post is mentioned on Twitter if it sounds interesting enough. But I cannot stand it when other feeds are injected into a Twitter stream — people’s tumblelogs, Delicious links and the like. That is just overload.

If I was interested in someone’s Delicious links, guess what — I’d be subscribed to their Delicious feed. If I cared in the slightest about somebody’s tumblelog, I’d visit their tumblelog. Equally, however, you could say that if somebody really cared about my blog posts then there is already an adequate way to be alerted to new posts: RSS.

This problem is going to increase in the coming year as lifestreams and social aggregators such as Profilactic, FriendFeed and Socialthing! gain in popularity. In fact, these sites themselves demonstrate the problem itself rather nicely.

If you look at, for instance, my Profilactic ‘mashup’, you will see my blog posts appearing and soon afterwards the Twitter tweet announcing it. Then you will see my Delicious links repeated in a blog post (for vee8 at least). Jaiku had to be taken out because it is itself a pseudo-lifestream that already incorporates Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter and what-have-you.

Plus, Facebook has just begun to implement its own social aggregator-style features. If you already have the Delicious application installed then import your Delicious posts into your Facebook news feed, you will be getting the duplication in the Facebook news feed alone. (I tried it hoping that it would sync with Facebook’s ‘Posted Items’ feature — no such luck.)

This whole problem is summed up quite succinctly by Jon Bounds in a comment at Cybersoc:

The Facebook status, pulled from a twitter auto-announcing a blog post generated from del.icio.us links is not what I want form these services. And I get the feed of it at each stage.

It is probably time to step back, decide on which social aggregator I want to use, stick with it and stop republishing stuff on other websites. Still, I can’t help thinking that it just feels right to merge my Twitter account with my Facebook status, and it just feels right to publicise my blog posts on my Twitter account.

At the same time, it’s just not cool to read the same messages over and over again on several different websites. The internet is starting to feel like a giant echo chamber.

To Google Reader, that is.

I’ve been a user of Bloglines pretty much ever since I started heavily using RSS feeds. Which is probably getting on for a couple of years. I was pretty happy with it. Sure, sometimes it is a bit slow to update feeds, and it is down more often than I would like. But all-in-all Bloglines is pretty impressive. There were just one or two things missing.

Google Reader used to be pretty much universally regarded as a duff product. When I first tried it when it initially launched it was chronically slow, ugly and generally clunky. I stayed well clear. But last week it was given a major spring clean so I thought I would try using it as an experiment over the weekend. I haven’t visited Bloglines since.

While the old Google Reader stank of a company beginning to rest on its laurels, it now looks as though they are proactively grabbing RSS by the scruff of the neck and making it seem interesting to normal people who don’t know their RSS from their elbow (sorry to whoever I stole that joke from; sorry for even telling it).

Describing it as “Your inbox for the web”? Why did nobody think of that before?! And as everybody else has noted, the email connection doesn’t end there. Google Reader’s new look is more than a nod towards the Gmail interface. A great improvement.

And there are a whole lot of nifty features that I have fallen in love with. Okay, that ‘next’ browser button is a bit of a gimmick. It’s not good if you’ve got about 200 blogs to read. You don’t know what’s coming next. Some blogs take bloody ages to load (this is one of the plus points of RSS). And if you wanted to do something like star or share it a post (more on those later) after reading it via the ‘next’ button it would be a right pain.

The next button is quite fun. You don’t know what you’re gonna get. It’s like a lucky bag. Which can be fun, I guess. It’s good if you’ve emptied your ‘inbox’ (as we now seem to be calling it) and you just want a quick way to see what’s been written in the past few minutes. It does seem to be a little bit quirky — sometimes it takes you straight to the actual post, other times it takes you to the blog’s front page. It’s not a major problem though.

The OPML import worked smoothly, and all of my RSS feeds appeared in the same folders (or is that labels? tags? More on that again in a bit) as in Bloglines. And one of the first things I noticed was that when I clicked on a folder the entries appeared in (reverse) chronological order, just like blogs. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for Bloglines to do.

In Bloglines if I click on my ‘Blogs’ folder, each blog is listed alphabetically with (as far as I could tell) no way to change it. If you want to be up to date it’s a poor system. The most recent stories are buried in among everything else. What a pain! Google Reader has recognised this. Top marks.

If I were to suggest an improvement, it would be an option for posts to appear in (non-reverse) chronological order. Maybe, perhaps if you wanted to see how a story developed, you would prefer to read the oldest posts first. At the moment I am scrolling all the way down, and by the end I could be reading stuff that is over a day old which feels a bit pointless.

Another cool feature, although not too impressive or unique, is automatic refreshing. It’s useful, but Bloglines also implemented this feature very recently.

In Bloglines, if you open a huge folder, everything in that folder is automatically marked as read, even if you haven’t come close to seeing it. If I was interrupted then I would have to manually mark each post as unread, which took a bloody age. Google Reader has an amazingly smart, yet simple, solution. Posts are only marked as read as you scroll past them. So I can safely click away from any open folder safe in the knowledge that everything that I haven’t read will still be there.

Another nifty interface feature is the option to change how you view your feeds. You can select ‘list’ view, where entries appear exactly as emails appear in Gmail. Then there is ‘expanded’ view which follows the familiar Bloglines-style approach. Although I would always prefer expanded view for reading blogs, list view is fantastic if you just want to skim headlines.

One thing that frustrates me about the feature, though, is that (as far as I can tell) there is no way to view one folder in list view and another in expanded view. I would like to read the Digg feed in list view because there are a lot entries that I don’t want to read, but I would prefer everything else to be shown in expanded view. It would be good if there was a way for me to set it up this way so that I didn’t have to keep on switching between the views.

Another feature borrowed from Gmail is the ability to ’star’ items. If I find an entry particularly useful for whatever reason, clicking the star icon will leave it easily accessible in the ’starred’ section. Once again, this was a bit of a pain in Bloglines. If I didn’t want to save it to del.icio.us I just had to make it as unread. Google Reader’s ’starring’ system is much tidier. This is proving useful for roundup purposes.

A feature that shares equal billing with ’starring’ is the ability to ’share’ items. I’m not really sure what the point of this is supposed to be. It seems like it’s trying to do something similar to del.icio.us, but it’s much more basic and a bit rubbish really. As an example, I’ve decided to ’share’ my last blog post on my shared items page. As you can see, it’s not up to much. It just reminds me of those blogs where all of the posts have been plagiarised. I’m not really sure what the point of this feature is.

Now on to my complaints! You can expect things to be a bit hairy because it’s still a Google Labs product, but there are still a lot of improvements to be made. Firstly, there still seem to be a few loading quirks / bugs / issues. Sometimes I find myself staring at the Google Labs fizzing conical flask for an eternity. Often the ‘updated subscriptions’ panel doesn’t update so it says that I have unread items even though I’ve read them.

Tags / labels / folders also need improvement. For a start, they seem to have three different names for the same thing now. That’s unless I haven’t understood some kind of subtle difference between tags and folders. I also can’t find an easy way to create a new folder. The only way seems to be to tag a post and then go to ‘manage subscriptions’ to put things into the relevant folder. What a pain.

Why can’t you just create a folder in the ‘manage subscriptions’ section or even when you’re reading a feed? There is a dropdown menu for each feed that only contains one option: unsubcribe. Why not put it there?

All-in-all, though, Google Reader is now fantastic. The only thing I really miss from Bloglines is the Firefox plugin, although I’m sure a Google Reader one will appear soon enough. There are still a few rough patches, but I’m happy enough with it for me to be using it all the time now. Good work, Google.

Update: Another great thing I’ve just remembered about Google Reader is that images from posts made on Blogger are actually appearing, which they never did in Bloglines. That’s probably just Google being crafty, but I like it.

Email problems: I suspect that I’m not receiving any emails. I’ve even sent myself emails and they haven’t arrived. So if you’ve sent me an email in the past 24 hours, I haven’t received it. For the time being, send your email to s0452402 [at] sms.ed.ac.uk. Thanks.

Well, given that I wrote about it the other day without having actually used it, I’ll just quickly write my brief thoughts on Google Chat. It’s pretty nifty; quite impressive, and quite similar to what I expected. Interestingly, unlike in Google Talk, emoticons are actually there (in a sense!). I think that Google Chat is best viewed as an optional extra, as I’d rather use Google Talk if I could. However, Google Chat would be extremely useful if you were on a PC that doesn’t have Google Talk installed.

Bloody hell.

So just to be sure, my email address is now:

doctorvee [at] googlemail [dot] com

Update: I’ve decided to just use a doctorvee.co.uk address. Anything will work you know. duncan [at] doctorvee [dot] co [dot] uk for instance. It should be noted that both gmail and googlemail addresses will work though, so no need to update address books just yet. Not until something happens with Gmail anyway — although the Gmail one should work for the moment, nobody can say if it will in the future. Gah.

Update: More info on the dispute (via).