Monday, March 31, 2014

Thing 8 of the 23 mobile things

Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare


I have been a regular user of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare for several years and have had periods where I am focused on staying connected to people and local activities through all three, but I find those periods are hard to maintain and the time spent managing all three is often more that I can afford to spend away from the real world.

FB logoFacebook has been a great way to reconnect with people from my distant past, stay connected with people from my recent past and develop sometimes surprising connections with people I might have only chatted with briefly in person. I am a bit of a lurker, meaning I read and like items but rarely post my own news. I think I forget that the people who I feel are right at my fingertips might not even realize I'm out there. I have been known to stop the feed of someone who over-shares or who has vastly, sometimes offensively, different opinions about life that I do, but I have a hard time un-friending anyone.

foursquareFoursquare was fun when I first discovered it. I really enjoyed checking in at places and seeing if I knew anyone else who was there. As a person highly motivated by awards and stickers I liked the point system and the badges that they offered. After about six months of checking in at every restaurant, shop and event I attended, my family went to the MN State Fair and I attempted to Foursquare my way through the day. A few hours and more that a dozen check-ins later I realized I was feeling so much pressure to get my points that I wasn't enjoying the day at all. I pretty much gave up on the app after that. I now limit myself to the occasional check-in at someplace unusual or if I suspect that they may have a discount available by checking in. I do frequently use Foursquare to find shops or restaurants in areas I'm unfamiliar with and have found that the recommendations are really spot on and the hidden tips rarely fail to meet expectations.

Twitter_logo_blueTwitter is my least favorite "thing" in the list of suggestions. I have always found the interface cluttered and the tweet itself fails to keep my attention. In an attempt to find greater value in the format, I thought about what information I would want quick bites of, or ways I could use it to point me to bigger stories. I decided to get rid of a lot of the celebrity tweets I was following and instead added news outlets. This seems to be the best use of Twitter I've found so far. I don't have time to read every article or watch every clip but I can get a relatively balanced take on a topic by compiling the sources and reading further when needed. I realize that the apps in thing 4 do the same and I think that they probably do it better, but I can't find another way that I would regularly use Twitter.

hootsuiteI have dabbled a bit with HootSuite but by no means feel like I have a strong handle on it. I like that it puts the most used social media apps in one place and allows the user to manage all of them at once. Posting to all of the apps, managing views and feedback would be very useful in an organization where a consistent message across platforms is desired. The ability to see stats would be helpful to see how successful postings are from site to site and how far the postings spread. As an individual, and one who infrequently posts to any of the sites I doubt that I will regularly use it.

Friday, March 28, 2014

Thing 7 of the 23 mobile things

Pinterest


Pinterest iconOh Pinterest you great time thief. I have been using this for a little over a year and when I have time to kill and have used all of my lives on Candy Crush Saga, I have been know to dabble in the land of Pinterest. What I particularly like about the app is that you are able to find images for almost anything you are wondering about. I wanted to know what Suffrage jewelry looked like and boom there it was. I wanted a photo of the market in Helsinki, success. It feels like a better resource for quality images than Google images because what you find are usually images posted by people who love what they are posting and have edited out the ads and just plain bad photos. The nature of the format, people choosing to pin what they find interesting, lends to better examples of a topic and the best, most re-pinned tend to be the first that you see. You can also get a good sense of someone's style and interests by looking at their pages. I have learned a lot about my friends and family in a way that I didn't from their Facebook profile or frankly from spending time with them. This format would lend itself to an organization with multiple locations or topics that they wanted to communicate. If a system created a general account and then created boards for each building, it could be a quick easy way to share programs, readers advisory, building updates, displays. The potential for communicating in a visual medium is very inviting. Where Twitter fails to hold my interest with its jumble of letters and symbols I feel like Pinterest invites me to explore in a format which feels much more natural to me.

Thing 6 of the 23 mobile things

SignNow and Quickoffice


signnowOh how I wish I had SignNow when I was buying my house. The first time we bought a house was 12 years ago and everything was done via fax or in person. Both methods of communication were inconvenient and time consuming. When we purchased our last house in 2012 we handled almost everything with texts and emailed or scanned PDFs on my laptop and phone. This allowed us to negotiate more smoothly and to generally move the process along at a quicker clip. The one piece we didn't have was an option for electronic signatures, the computer we had didn't have a touch screen and frankly I didn't know there was an app for that. This would have been a great time saver. I can see where this would be a great piece of technology in so many places and must be a tremendous help in business. Where people questioned faxed signatures when they first came on the scene, I can see where people could doubt the validity of this. It seems an obvious next step in conducting business from a distance and would be a great resource for outreach. I look forward to watching this develop.

quickofficeQuickoffice, which I was hoping to tryout on the Kindle was, like far too many things, not available for the Kindle. I explored other app options and the presentations felt really amateurish and across the board they had terrible reviews. I opted to skip this portion of this thing since I don't feel like I would use this on my phone and it seems like a waste of memory to have just in case. I would like to see a Kindle option since I'm sure I would use it in this format but until then I will have to drag out the old laptop to use Office.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Thing 5 of the 23 mobile things

springpad

Springpad


I chose Springpad as the app to try for this thing. I have enjoyed playing with it, but I can’t help comparing it with Goodreads, Recipe.com, Foursquare, etc. I like the idea of having the notebooks all in one app and with a little practice I think I would become comfortable with the format for quickly noting a movie or book I want to try. I already use the other above mentioned apps regularly and just the thought of moving everything I had already have noted or collected over to Springpad is daunting. I like that the most popular titles for books and movies are already offered as suggestions and I think I could start to use it as a to do list rather that an already done list which I use the other apps for. I liked the Pinterest feel of the layout and I’m a list maker. I think that of the apps that I have tried so far this will probably be the one I am most likely to keep playing with.