One of IBM Connections features is Bookmarks, where you can save and share bookmarks, in addition to simply sharing a bookmark you can share it with a Community, add it to an Activity, or create a blog post out of it, all from the same bookmarklet.
Nice functionality, but I find a lot of content to share while in Google Reader, so I thought it would be nice to be able to share directly from Google Reader in to IBM Connections. Google Reader allows you to create your own Send To Actions so you can share beyond the services they already set up for you. You can find and customize the Send To actions in Google Reader Preferences
at the bottom of the page you will find instructions for creating your own Send To actions
I added a Sent To action for IBM Connections in the Lotus Greenhouse, to configure for your own site just replace ‘greenhouse.lotus.com’ with the URL of your own Connections installation. There are three fields required to create a Send To action
Name: This is how it will appear in your menu (IBM Connections in my example)
URL: this is the URL to the bookmarklet along with the keywords for URL, Title, etc. Mine looks like this
Icon URL: if you want an image to appear next to the Name you can point to an image here, I pointed to the Bookmark Image from greenhouse.
Save your Sent To action and you can now share directly from Google Reader in to IBM Connections
If you use Google Reader on multiple machines the Send To action will appear on any machine you log in to with the same Google ID you created it under. If you IBM Connections environment is behind a firewall, the Send To action will only work when you have access to Connections.
Over the weekend I finally took some time to check out Google+, I haven’t played with all the features yet, and I am yet to be convinced that it will replace Facebook and Twitter where most of my sharing takes place today, but I am keeping an open mind, and it certainly has some nice features. If you have an Android phone be sure to check out the Google+ App for Android.
I am not going to write a full review of Google+ there are enough of them out there already, but I am going to talk about the Circles feature.
The thing is, I hate maintaining lists, which is one of the reasons why my music player of choice is my second generation iPod shuffle. There are many things I like about the shuffle, but mostly it’s the fact that I don’t have to maintain playlists, I just load it up and go, it does the rest of the work for me. Facebook has Friend Lists which are similar to circles, but except for a couple of lists I use to make sure I don’t miss certain updates I have never taken the time to create and manage lists. Back to circles, nice idea, but am I really going to spend the time creating and managing them? Probably not.
Beyond simply creating and managing lists, or circles (I do manage a couple of Twitter lists but they are low maintenance) there is another question. Do I really feel secure using a list or circle to decide who can see what post on my social networks? First I am putting a lot of confidence in Google or Facebook’s privacy and security controls to post something and expect that only a certain few will see it. Second there is the inevitable screw up that will happen when I post something to the wrong circle, and if you are saying “that won’t happen to me†be honest who hasn’t sent a direct message as a tweet by accident?
So how about you? Will you use Google+? If yes will you manage your circles and share differently with different circles or will you be like me, one circle fits all?
This is not a New Years resolutions post, these are just some ideas I have to change the way I share, and work in the new year.
1. “Like†Less Often – I know Facebook is on a mission to place a “Like†button on every page of the internet (yes including this one). I almost never use the Facebook Like buttons outside of Facebook, if there is something I “Like†I generally prefer to share it in to my stream, usually with a comment. On Facebook though it is a different story, the Like button has become a cheap substitute for actually commenting, I want to try to “Like†less and comment more (I am referring more to Statuses and Links, than Photos here)
I really prefer the Follow term used in Lotus Connections 3.0, when I Follow something I indicate I have interest in it, where as Like indicates I have something to say I am just not saying it.
2. Inbox Zero – it’s not realistic, or even in my control, so I am not even going to try. Last year I tried to keep my inbox to less than one page (i.e. “no scrollâ€) I know I was successful for a good few months, then it all fell apart. Having spent time at the end of last year restoring my inbox to sanity, I would now like to keep it that way. A few things to try to help me
Unsubscribe from any legitimate e-mail I get but don’t read
Use mail rules to block or folder messages I can not block for various reasons but don’t read
Use Conversation mode more and eliminate repetitive messages
3. Comment More on Blogs I read – along the lines of number 1 above, be better at taking time to leave a comment on a blog to thank the author for help, agree, respectfully disagree, or otherwise. It is easy to read and move on, more difficult to remember to stop and give feedback.
4. Share Differently – one thing I keep noticing is that I am spreading content all over the place, here on my blog, twitter, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitpic, Posterous (aka curiousmitch.net), just to name a few. This is what drove me to create my “Lifestream†site last year. While I haven’t really promoted it (I guess I am now), I use it as my site URL in some of my online profiles, and now have it linked on the header of this site. While I need to find more time to work on it, I intend it to be a one stop shop to capture my online activity (minus Facebook).
In addition to bringing all the activity together in one place, I also want to re-think how and where I share stuff, for example Twitpic, most Twitter clients do a terrible job of attaching the Tweet to the photo, so you wind up with a bunch of photos with no context. I could switch to another photo service, and spread stuff to yet another service, something I would prefer not to do. Another example is certain links, cartoons, articles that get shared on Twitter, some really are intended to be tweeted, and gone in an hour but other content I would like to have saved as more than a tweet. I also don’t want to clutter this site with every photo, cartoon, etc that I want to share. I am going try to use Posterous more for this type of sharing. As I mentioned when I migrated to WordPress, I thought about moving to Posterous, but did not feel it was ready (though since I migrated they have released an Android app), and while you could argue that I am creating “just another blog†I am going to use the Posterous site (aka curiousmitch.net) more for sharing photos, etc, and this site for the content you are used to seeing here. I hope this will help limit the number of places I share data, and make it easier for myself and others to go back and find something later on.
I am also playing with Memolane, I see that as more of a personal search and history, rather than a public one at least for now. Trunk.ly is another new site which does a nice job of collecting your shared links from Twitter, Facebook, and Delicious, into an easily searchable format, these are excellent tools that are aggregating existing content, not a place to create new content.
That’s all for now, there are a few more ideas rattling around my brain, but I will let them rattle a little longer. Would love to hear your thoughts on these items, and any other ideas you might have to change the way you work or share in the new year.
