Google Voice Update

Back in the original Google Voice review, I had mentioned that Google Voice was one of those Google projects that is eternally in Beta. Well, it seems that Google disagreed with me on that point. On Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010, Google announced on the Google Voice Blog, that Google Voice was coming out of Beta and is now available for new subscribers in the United States without the need for an invite!

Yup, those pesky and elusive Google Voice invites are now a thing of the past.  If you've been waiting for one, you need wait no more, just go and sign up for your new Google Voice account. It will give you something to do while syncing your new iPhone with your computer.  Or updating your old one to iOS 4.  Or just trying to avoid another iPhone story...

Evernote

Are you one of those people who goes out to a restaurant and has great ideas over dinner? You scribble them down on a napkin, or the back of your receipt and then stuff it into your wallet or a coat pocket and never seem to get back to it? Or if you do get back to it, some important part of it always seems to be missing? If you can relate to this, Evernote was created for you.

Evernote for Android

Evernote is a free service provided by the Evernote Corporation. It allows you to capture, organize, and reference your notes, pictures, web clippings, and more.  And you can do it from their web interface at http://www.evernote.com, or by downloading a client.  Currently clients are available for Mac OS X, Windows, the iPhone, the iPad, Android, Blackberry, the Palm Pre or Palm Pixi, and for Windows Mobile. Once you've created your free account, your notes will sync to each client as it connects to Evernote's servers.  The number of notes you can have is unlimited, but with a free account, you're limited to uploading 40MB of notes per month.  Evernote also offers a Premium account for $5 a month or $45 a year that increases your upload limit to 500MB a month and provides additional extra functions.

Getting started with Evernote is just a matter of creating a username and password and providing Evernote with a valid e-mail address. Evernote will send you a confirmation e-mail. Verify that you did create the account, then sign in with your new account, or download and install one or more clients.  You're ready to start capturing your notes.  Simple.

Evernote for Blackberry

There are a lot of ways to get something into Evernote.  The most obvious is to use one of the clients to create new text notes, or take a snapshot directly into Evernote from the client.  In my experience with my iPhone, taking photos directly to Evernote was always an iffy proposition.  I've lost pictures because the upload never completed, or a phone call came in during the upload, or because the client app just popped.  Much safer to take the picture to your phone's cameral roll, and then upload it from there to Evernote.  And on some devices you can also take voice notes as well.

The Windows and Mac clients also install an Evernote web clipping tool.  You can also download and install versions of the tool for various browsers on those machines where you don't want to have a full browser, but use often enough to want to be able to capture web clippings.  Once the tool is installed, just click on it to send an entire page to Evernote.  If you only want a portion of a web page, just select the area you want first.

Web clipping tool on a Mac browser

Evernote has a few other ways of allowing you to import information.  With each account you get an e-mail address that allows you to send or forward e-mail right into Evernote.  So when you get that hotel conformation letter you can forward it and have it in Evernote where you can find it quickly.  More on finding things later. If you start getting spam at that address filling up your Evernote, just go into settings on the web client and generate a new e-mail address for your Evernote account.  In addition to e-mail, you can drop Twitter messages into your evernote account.  Just follow @myen (My Evernote), and you will receive a direct message with a confirmation link.  Click on that link and sign into Evernote to associate your Twitter account with your Evernote account.  Then, if you tweet or retweet anything with @myen in it, that tweet will go right into your account.

Evernote will also import your Google Notebook items as notes.  To do this one you'll need to sign in to the web client and go into settings.  Click on the Import tab item, then click on Google Notebook. There is an instructional video, and detailed instructions to help you choose the import settings you want.  Presumably, Evernote will be expanding the number of services that you can import from in the near future.

Some products are even building in Evernote compatibility.  For example, the Cannon ImageFormula P-150 will scan documents and upload them directly to your Evernote account.  The Eye-Fi wireless SD card can send pictures directly from your digital camera to your Evernote account.  Mobile applications like Seesmic and Egretlist will also sync content to your Evernote account. You can find a list of similar products on Evernote's website.

Part of the Evernote package is syncing across all platforms, and access to all the various versions of the Evernote client.  Included with that is Evernote's Text Recognition feature.  Whenever you add an image, or a note containing images to Evernote, software scans the image looking for text.  It then indexes your note with the text that it found and the position of the text in the image. This allows you to find these images by searching for the text within them.  For example, I went on a picnic last year and tried some new wine. I took a picture of the wine bottle, so that I could remember to get more of it later.  Let's say I don't remember the wine, but do remember that a box of Club crackers was also in the picture.  I search on "club" and see what I find:

Evernote search on iPad

My search word is even highlighted in the picture.  Evernote doesn't keep an OCR copy of your image to search, and you can't get an OCR version of a photo out of Evernote.  Instead it keeps a list of possible text interpretations with different scores.  This lets you search for text in images without having to look at each image.  It isn't perfect, but it does give you a best guess.

Tags view on iPad

Evernote lets you organize your notes in two basic ways.  The first is that you can assign tags to your notes.  Tags can be anything you want, providing it is meaningful to you.  They let you pull similar data from across your list of notes.  The second method is to group related data items into notebooks. Notebooks pretty much work like folders, except you cannot nest them.  So, if you were a frequent traveller, you could create a notebook for each trip and add all the planning information for your trip into that notebook.  You could then tag your hotel confirmation as "Hotel", your rental car reservations as "Rental Car", your plane tickets as "Flights", and your schedule as "Itinerary".  Then when you need to find something, you can either look it up by the trip, or by the type of information it is.  Or you could create notebooks for "Hotel", "Rental Car", et al and tag the items by the date and destination of the trip.  Whatever makes sense to you.

One thing to be careful of when creating notebooks, is the kind of notebook.  Notebooks can be either synced or local, and once created the type cannot be changed.  You don't want to put data you need to take with you into a local notebook.

Mac client with synced and local notebooks

One of the nifty things that you can do with Evernote is to share your synced notebooks with others.  Either you can share the notebook with the world, or you can share it with specific individuals.  Evernote actually implements their website FAQ as a series of shared Evernote notes.  You can search it, or browse through the notes.  And you can link individual notes, or groups of notes from searches to your account so that you can pull up that help at need.  When you share a notebook with the world, it becomes available at a public url that begins with www.evernote.com/pub/ and your username. At the next level down, you get to set the name the world will see and add a description.  You can also determine the sort order of the items in the folder.

When sharing with individuals, you will need to provide the e-mail addresses of the individuals and determine if you wish to require them to log into Evernote in order to access the notebook.  You can also include an explanatory message to go along with the invite.  With a free account or when sharing to the world, you can only share files as read-only items, but with a Premium account you can choose to give your invitees privileges to edit the notebook and add or delete notes.

With the free account the kind of files you can place in a note are limited to text, images, audio, and PDF files.  And that is really enough for most people's needs.  But if you need more, you can try a Premium account, which will allow you to upload any file type.  It also allows you to search within PDF files, access note history, and maintain local notebooks on an iPhone or iPad.  I haven't tried the Premium account yet, so I can't vouch for these features.

Client for Windows

With the Premium account, the maximum size of an individual note is bumped up to 50 MB from 25, and the user gains the ability to turn off the advertisements that are displayed on the Evernote web site and in the client.  The ads aren't particularly offensive, but they do take up screen space.  Regular Evernote accounts are secured by the logon information, which is transmitted to the server using SSL, while the actual notes are transmitted in the clear.  With a Premium account, your entire session is encrypted with SSL instead of just the logon info.  If you're wanting to store just a few notes with sensitive information, you can encrypt just those notes using the windows client for Evernote.  Unfortunately these encryption tools haven't been built into the other clients yet.  And remember that encryption key, because you will have to type it in whenever you want to access any encrypted notes.

Evernote on Palm Pre

The big power of Evernote is the sync.  The fact that you can collect your notes anywhere you happen to be, right when the thought hits you, then organize them when you have time, and carry the finished product on your mobile device, or access it through the web.  Even if you're in an area with no network connection, you can add and edit notes and then sync the changes when you can connect again. The best part, however, is the fact that the guys at Evernote aren't sitting back on their laurels.  They're still working to improve and expand Evernote to provide new tools to capture, organize, and retrieve your notes.  It will be interesting to see what they add next.

Google Voice

As a counter point to the earlier review of the iPhone, this week we’re looking at something you can’t get on the iPhone: Google Voice.

A while ago, there used to be a service called Grand Central.  This was bought out by Google and re-named Google Voice.  And then Google started adding new capabilities to it.  GV is another of Google’s projects that is eternally in beta.  And like many of the others, if you can get in, it is pretty darn useful.  Right now, Google Voice is invitation only, which means that you need to find someone with a Google Voice number and ask them to send you an invite.  If you can’t find anyone, or your friends have all run out of invites, you can also go to https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googlevoiceinvite/ and ask Google if they’d be nice enough to send you an invite.  And if you’re not sure if you want one or not, you can look at the list of features at http://www.google.com/voice.  The price, however, is right: Google Voice is free, unless you use it for international calls. And even then there are considerable savings, depending on where you are calling and for how long.

When you sign up for Google Voice, you tell GV what one of your phone numbers is, and GV will either take over that number, or will assign you a new Google Voice phone number.  Using your existing number is convenient if you don’t want to have to give a new phone number to your contacts, but it can cause some problems.  So it may be easier to manage by just getting a new Google Voice number.  When someone calls your GV number, their call gets forwarded to your phone.  At that level, it seems a little useless.  But these days, most people have more than one phone.  You have your home number, your cell phone, your work number.  Pull all of these numbers into GV, and when someone calls your GV number, ALL of your phones ring.  The call gets routed to the phone you actually pick up on and you conduct your conversation normally.  And you can build rules in GV to control which phones get called, so your home phone won't ring when you're at work, and your work phone won't ring during the weekend. And so no phones will ring between midnight and 8 AM.  Whatever works for you.  Or if you just want to "hold all calls", turn on the Do Not Disturb feature, either for a set period of minutes, hours, or days, or just until you turn it off again.

So what happens to the call if you don't pick up?  Google Voice also gives you voice-mail on your GV number.  You can listen to the voice mail on your web site, or you can give GV an e-mail address and GV will attempt transcribe the audio message into text and e-mail the text to you.  The transcription is completely automated.  It's not perfect, but you can pretty much get the idea.  It even shades the words in the transcript to show you how confident the software is with the transcription.

You can text for free with GV, and you can have incoming text messages forwarded to your cell phone, although normal texting rates on your cell still apply.  This can sometimes be confusing to the people you are texting with.  GV has settings that will allow you to appear to text with your regular cell number, or with your GV number.  So do some thinking about your texting habits before you start using Google Voice to text, or your friends may think you’ve got two different phones that you’re texting them with.

Google voice is free in the US, and provides free long distance in the US, and special rates for overseas calls.  You can sign up for GV without paying a cent, or giving a credit card number. They even give you a ten cent credit when you sign up, even if you never give them any kind of payment information.  But it won’t let you make international calls unless you do arrange for payment.

Coolest of all, you can create groups and build rules based on the groups.  That way your folks can't call you at work, but your business associates can.  Someone bothering you? Block their number altogether.  Send calls from your creditors straight to voice-mail, but let your close friends ring on through.  The tools give you a lot of control. And even if you've built rules for groups, you can override them by putting special rules on an individual.  You can even record multiple voice mail messages so that the outgoing message changes depending on who is calling.

And since you can block anybody, and have voice mail, your GV number is safe to publish on the internet.  Or put a GV widget on your website so someone can click it and have GV call them and you. Just like the one I just added to the Right sidebar. Care to give me feedback on this or any other part of The Nifty Tech Blog? Just click the widget and enter your phone number. GV will call you and connect you to my voice mail.

If you’re tired of giving out all of your numbers to people, or you need to give someone a contact number, but don't really want them to have your real phone number, just give them your GV number. Do you need someone to call you at a specific time, but don't know where you will be? Just give out your Google Voice number and you're done. If someone calls you that isn't in your address book, GV automatically screens the call. You pick up, hear their name, and GV gives you a menu of options that lets you accept the call, or send them to voice-mail, or transfer them to a different number.

Google Voice is still an evolving product, so by the time you read this, some of the features may have changed, or new features added on.  The aim of Google Voice is to give people control over their phone experience.  And they seem to be doing a decent job so far.  There are even a number of official and third-party applications that let you access Google Voice features from your mobile phone.  Unless you’ve got an iPhone that is.

For some reason, Apple doesn’t seem to want the Google Voice experience on the iPhone.  There were a number of iPhone applications in the App store that let users access their GV accounts, but Apple pulled them all, and they’ve been very tight lipped about why the applications were pulled.  When an official reason was finally offered, Apple said that the applications duplicated functionality that already existed on the iPhone.  Yeah.  Right.  iPhone using consumers can only hope that Apple and Google with patch over whatever snit their having and team up to give us better access to their products and our data.  In the meantime, Google has created a mobile web page for Google Voice to put as much of the functionality into a web app as possible.  To access the web app version, just point Mobile Safari to m.google.com/voice.

Google Voice helps simplify your life by giving you a single phone number for everything, that never changes, but still gives you control over who can call you, where and when you’ll get their call, and how phone messages will find you.  It even allows you to take calls on any phone that happens to be around.  Google Voice gives you the power to make your phone number dance to your own tune.  And that definitely fits my definition of Nifty Tech.

And a thanks to IconsPedia.com for the Google Voice icon at the top of this article. - Editor.

Crash Plan

One of the most important things you can do with your computer, is back it up. Backups preserve your important data and can save untold hours of work by letting you revert to previous versions when you discover that you’ve done something to mess up one of your precious documents. Backups also soften the blow of losing a computer to age, theft, or other disasters. But if all of your backups are in one place, then how safe is your data?

This is where this week’s pick, Crash Plan, comes in. Crash Plan provides automatic online backup services for home and business users and allows continuous backups to multiple destinations while you work. Crash Plan, the company, offers Crash Plan, the service, for home users, and Crash Plan Pro for businesses. Crash Plan, the software, is available for Mac OS X, Windows, Windows 64 bit, Linux, and Solaris. The Crash Plan Software is free, but you can purchase a license to upgrade to Crash Plan + and unlock additional capabilities for $59.99 per box. And you can easily have computers on the same account running the free Crash Plan, and Crash Plan +. The Crash Plan Pro software is available for the same platforms, and comes in both client and server versions. You can try Crash Plan Pro for 30 days for free, or purchase licenses starting at $350 for 5 licenses with additional savings for higher increments. Pro licenses come with 1 year of support and maintenance which can be renewed for an additional fee. For more information, check out http://www.crashplan.com.

Since this blog is primarily aimed at consumers, the rest of this review will deal with the Crash Plan for Home offerings. Business purchasers interested in Crash Plan won’t take my word for it anyway, and will check out the Crash Plan site.

So, when you download and install the Crash Plan software on your computer, Crash Plan will automatically start up and prompt you to create an account. Your Crash Plan account doesn’t cost you anything, and it is used to coordinate the backups of your different computers and associate them together as we’ll see in a minute. It is important that you give a valid e-mail address when you set up your account, as Crash Plan will send you regular reports showing how your computers are backing up and alerting you to any problems.

After you’ve created your account, the Crash Plan engine will start in the background. This runs as a service and is working to back up your computer even when no one is logged in. As long as the computer is on, Crash Plan is working to protect your data.

When the Crash Plan application comes up, you’ll see that you have four choices for backup destinations: Crash Plan Central, Friend, Another Computer, and Folder. This is the order that Crash Plan considers important for protecting your data. But for the purpose of getting you set up and working with Crash Plan, we’re going to look at these in the opposite order.

Folder is pretty much the most important for getting Crash Plan up and working. This lets you designate a local folder where you can store backups for your computer. This can be a directly attached drive or raid, or network attached storage, but the drive must be mounted on your computer for Crash Plan to find it. Crash Plan isn’t currently smart enough to mount network drives automatically. The Folder is important for three reasons: 1) it provides a quick source for data restores, 2) it is the default location for other computers to back up to your computer, and 3) it provides a way to seed backups for remote locations.

Let’s look at the last one closely. One of the big problems with online backup systems is the initial backup. It takes forever, and until it is done, nothing is really protected. Crash Plan gives you a way around this. Crash Plan will let you attach a drive and back up to it as a “seed” for a remote backup. Once this local backup is complete, you can disconnect the drive, ship it to the remote location, connect it to a computer there, and attach it to the remote copy of Crash Plan. The folder names that Crash Plan creates are encoded, so Crash Plan will know that that folder is the backup to your machine, and will automatically connect back to your computer and begin incremental backups. This is a great saver in time and bandwidth.

Selecting Another Computer allows you to backup your computer to any other computer on your Crash Plan account. If you’ve created a folder on the other machine, it will start backing up to a new subfolder for the new computer. I’m not sure what it will do if you don’t have a default folder set up.

The Friend option is one of the cool points of Crash Plan. Let’s say you have a friend who also uses Crash Plan. You both need offsite backups, right? Well, each of you buys a drive, connects it locally, backs up your computer to the drive, and then exchange drives. When your friend attaches your seeded archive to his computer via the attach archive folder command on the Friends screen (see photo, below), Crash Plan sorts it out. He becomes your external backup, and you become his external backup when you connect his archive. All for free! Well, for the cost of the drives. Crash Plan’s online servers act as a Dynamic DNS service to connect your computers together, so you don’t even need a static IP. By default, all Crash Plan transmissions are encrypted, so your data is protected when going over the Internet. And the archives are also encrypted, so even if your friend is tempted to snoop at your data, he can’t. By default Crash Plan uses the password to your account as your encryption key, but you can specify your own encryption key if you want. Just don’t forget it!

The last Destination option is Crash Plan Central. This represents storage on Crash Plan’s online servers. Crash Plan will rent you unlimited storage for one computer for as low as $3.50 a month, or on the Family unlimited plan you can get unlimited storage for the computers of every member of your household for as low as $5 a month. You don’t actually pay these as monthly fees, you pay a lump sum for one, two, or three years. These prices are very comparable to other online backup services such as Mozy, Carbonite, and Backflash. And Crash Plan Central will even ship you a drive (for another fee) so you can seed your initial backup and then ship it back to them.

Those are just the destination options. You can use any of them, or all of them. If you’ve got a dozen friends using Crash Plan, you can back up to all of them. Crash Plan keeps track of what files are backed up to which destination so incremental updates are short and quick (unless you just copied Gigs of music or movies onto your drive, nothing will make that quick).

Beneath the Backup Destinations on the Crash Plan screen is where you select the files to back up. The same set is used for all destinations, but other than that you have full control over what gets backed up, and what doesn’t. Back up your entire drive, or just select files and folders. It’s up to you. But it is a good idea to avoid backing up the folder that Crash Plan uses to note what it has backed up where. And the backups themselves.

Crash Plan lets you restore files from whatever destinations are available, in real time. Obviously, the more you restore, the longer it will take. And local restores are much faster than restores over the internet. But if the only copy of that file you need is on Uncle Joe’s computer in Alabama, or if he’s just the only one online, you can get it

Crash Plan also has a web interface so you can sign on and change your settings, check your backups, or restore files from any computer on the internet. Get your laptop stolen while going to a conference? With Crash Plan, you can still download the latest version of the big presentation to any computer on the net.

Crash Plan also does its own maintenance. You set your retention policy for how many versions of old and deleted items you want to keep, and Crash Plan will review your destinations, prune the expired files, and will verify and fix any damaged files in your archive.

The free version of the Crash Plan application does have a couple of ads to support the service. But you only really need to run the application when you’re checking on your backups, changing settings, or dealing with a problem. Or you can upgrade to a Crash Plan + license and do away with the ads altogether. The Crash Plan + license also gets you support for commercial use of the service, continuous backup protection (the free version only backs up once a day), and 448 bit encryption (the free version only does 128 bit encryption).

There area few other features to Crash Plan, but I’ve covered the big points. Crash Plan is a simple, easy to set up way to back up your Mac, PC, or Unix box, or all three, to any number of local and remote sites. It works securely and automatically over the internet, and only costs you the price of the storage. It really is the only option for online backup that is anything close to free. For the simplicity, redundancy, security, and peace of mind it affords, Crash Plan really is Nifty Tech.

Twitter – an interview with Tee Morris

This week, in a special review, we’re going to look at Twitter, a free service available at http://twitter.com and available on any system that can operate a modern web browser. Now, there are many worthwhile clients that access and add value to Twitter, but we won’t be looking at any of those in depth until later articles.

When I realized that Twitter deserved a place in the Nifty Tech ranks, I also realized that I couldn’t do the review justice on my own. So I turned to the man who literally wrote the book on Twitter: blogger, podcaster, father of podiobooks, and author of “All a Twitter: A Personal and Professional Guide to Social Networking with Twitter," Tee Morris.

Nifty Tech Blog: Tee, thanks for taking the time to talk with me about Twitter.

Tee Morris: Not a problem. Taking about Twitter is something I do well.

NTB: Let’s start out from the view of someone completely new to Twitter. Why Twitter? With all the different social networks around, what brings people to Twitter?

TM: As Shakespeare wrote back in 1602, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” This is part of the appeal in Twitter. I’ve heard people say that Twitter is a timesink, but I found that in Facebook, MySpace, and even the choice chat apps like iChat/AIM and Skype. You go off on tangents, and go, and go, and go…

Blogging was always a golden unicorn for me as I would spend hours on posts, and would not get anything done in my writing projects after blogging about writing. Twitter, by design, allows you to get to the point, keep it simple, and then move on. This is one (of many) reasons why it is so popular, but I believe it is its most appealing attribute.

NTB: How easy is it for someone to get started with Twitter?

TM: Very. You can have Twitter up and running in minutes. Heck, in All a Twitter, I have you up and running in only a few pages.

But this is the biggest mistake that people make when starting off with Twitter.

What I explain in All a Twitter (and I’m really proud of those readers that follow my advice) is that a first impression is everything. After you set up an account, but before your first tweet, new users need to take care of their profile. When the profile is complete, you then have to think, “Okay. What do I have to say?” Keep it simple.

Then, if you think, “I can get into this…” you need to find yourself a good third-party client like Twhirl, DestroyTwitter, or TweetDeck. You start to unlock the potential of Twitter.

So yes, you can get started in minutes. To get Twitter running efficiently, you need to invest some time.

NTB: Any advice for someone looking to build up his or her network?

TM: Yes. Avoid those “Twitter Follower-Gathering” services. This is a very common tactic people use to build up followers, but they don’t know (or if it’s for the Social Media Snake Oil Salesmen or some of the ‘Make Money Online’ authors, they don’t care to know) how these services work. The sites run script that follows random people en masse, then drops them 24-72 hours later, and then picks a whole new group of people, people you may — or may not — share anything in common. And if that inflation of numbers isn’t enough, they tend to slip in ads for their services at random times, usually without the knowledge of the user.

My favorite network builders are Mr. Tweet or Tweepi. Both of these services are unobtrusive, do not inflate numbers in a slimy or questionable manner, and allow you to “know” whom it is you’re following. Also look up hashtags of topics you’d want to cover, and look up Trending Topics that Twitter tracks. Not only do Trending Topics make great conversation starters but you can also use them to build your networks.

NTB: Can you take a second and explain what hashtags are, and how they’re used?

TM: Hashtags (covered in depth in All a Twitter) are a method used to track various subjects on Twitter. I’ve heard people say “Hashtags are dead like Facebook Groups…” (which is sad as I manage a few in Facebook) but I think this is because of goofy hashtags users (like me) tend to come up with to pepper a tweet with that sense of humor. Even with my goofy hashtags, I still use them in earnest. Currently I use hashtags for an event I’m helping out with their Social Media initiative. When people attend CREATE South 2010 this year, the plan is to amend our tweets with #createsouth2010.

That is the anatomy of a hashtag: a pound sign with a keyword. It is best to keep hashtags brief, but you need to make sure when people see the hashtag what it’s referencing. If, for example, we were using cs2010, would we be talking about CREATE or the 2010 Adobe CS coming out? Hashtags are great tracking tools, and really tap into the potential of how topics catch on in the Twitterverse.

NTB: OK. So you’ve set yourself up on Twitter, and developed a core group of people to interact with. Where can you go from here? What can you do with Twitter?

TM: You can use it for conversation. You can use it for promotion of a special event. You can use it to share resources with people that are in the same spheres of influence as you are.

Or all of the above.

Seriously, the question should be “What can’t you do with Twitter?” as your possibilities are endless provided that you participate.

What do I mean by that?

People tend to get on to Twitter and then attempt to fly through the Twitterverse on auto-pilot. They use the scripts for the numbers, fill their stream with pre-fabricated tweets, and then walk away without engaging their network. Success with Twitter is not — and I will say this again and again, NOT — the numbers or the amount of tweets you send a day, but it is about your network, how they respond to you, and how you respond to them. As I mentioned in Episode 10 of Bird House Rules, you need to take an active role in your network; and if both you and your Followers have a vested interest in each other, you can achieve anything.

NTB: I’d like to raise a counterpoint to this and say that there IS a place for automated tweets in the Twittersphere. For instance, under my Nifty Tech Blog account, I follow a number of Twitter accounts that are basically news aggregators. They automatically tweet headlines and links to articles. Now I will admit that in my personal tweet feed, I would never follow such a feed, but I have a special need to be able to scan headlines as part of my research for this site. So if you’re making the choice to be just an aggregator, you’re catering to a very niche market, and sacrificing your chance to build community.

TM: You mistake what I mean by auto-pilot. Automated tweets and auto-pilot are not the same thing. For example, I run two other accounts for organizations: IDGuardian and CreateSouth. I use HootSuite to schedule many tweets so that if I cannot tweet on a regular basis, I have plenty of content heading out to my respective networks.

This is not putting an account on auto-pilot though. There are plenty of accounts out there that are spewing out content, and a lot of it is repetitive. The same link and, in one case to many, the same tweet, is repeated ad nauseum. The tweets I’ve scheduled do get responses from people when questions or comments are made. This is what I mean by the engagement of the Community. If someone pings you on Twitter, ping back. Start a conversation, get people taking.

News services that you reference are also not spewing out spam or innocuous content. These feeds specialize in headlines on Social Media, on tech news, on the latest headlines from Mashable and Gizmodo, and so on. I don’t think automated tweets are all evil. Just the accounts that really don’t care what their community has to say.

NTB: A lot of critics of Twitter complain that they don’t care what someone just had for lunch, and don’t really want to see a bunch of tweets from the bathroom. Anything to say to those critics?

TM: In my four years on Twitter, I have never seen someone tweet “I’m going to be the bathroom...” and if they did, I would probably drop them.

In a talk I gave in New Zealand on Twitter, I did use the “I’m grooming my cat” example. What may seem innocuous is actually a great example of what a quality network can accomplish with Twitter. So let’s say you tweet “I’m grooming my cat.” Someone else can reply with “I have to every day. I have a Maine Coon.” You respond back with “Yeah, if I don’t, I’m stepping over hairball mines.” A third person can come back with a reply to both people with “Have you tried ((insert bit.ly link here)) for hairballs? Works like a charm.”

This is the power of a quality network on Twitter. Strength in numbers.

NTB: There are a lot of stories about scams on Twitter, people posting links to pages with viruses, stealing personal information, and hijacking Twitter accounts. What can people do to protect themselves from these scams?

TM: Something I’ve said about the Social Media movement on a whole: Social Media is the “Blinking 12:00” of the Internet. So many people want to play with the cool toys, but no one wants to know how they work. The Social Media cheerleaders also do not want people to know that there are some real bottom feeders and opportunistic con artists out there. There is nothing that sets Social Media apart from anything else on the Internet. You have to be careful.

For example — Phishing scams via Direct Messages. If a friend pings you with a message that just seems a little weird. In other words, they don’t make the DM personal, that’s your first warning. If you get a DM from someone you rarely hear from, and they’re asking you to click on a link, that’s another reason to be wary. Finally, if you click on the link and a site wants your username and password, the answer is “No.” You just have to be careful, and keep your brain in the “ON” position.

NTB: What is the coolest thing about Twitter?

TM: It’s people. I have met so many cool people through this service, and this Community never stops surprising me. I consider myself quite lucky to have connected with the people I have through Twitter.

NTB: So Twitter at its best emphasizes the social aspect of Social Media?

TM: I truly believe it is. There’s a lot of initiatives out there, but have you heard of any Face-to Facebook meetings? What about Podcast Pow-Wow’s? (Well, okay we got Podcamps, so I’m busted there…) but Tweet-up’s tends to happen left and right across the country and around the world. With all its faults and some of its noise, I still believe in Twitter, and I believe it works better than any of the initiatives out there.

NTB: Anything else you’d like to say to someone thinking about getting on Twitter?

TM: If you want to give Twitter a spin, be patient with it. Don’t think you have to be brilliant with every tweet or as charismatic as Chris Brogan or Coach Deb. All you have to be is yourself, look over your incoming tweets, and chime in with your opinion or viewpoint. That is, after all, what Twitter is all about.

NTB: There are a lot of books out now about Twitter. What is different about your approach?

TM: All a Twitter is the first, and perhaps the only, title that is written from a user’s perspective. Most of the books that are out there are written by marketing experts, by people who only have one aim: To make a fast buck. They love to talk about communities in between their sales pitches and flavor of the month; but if you review their streams you will notice the comments tend to be one-way, questions asked without follow-ups to replies, and (of course) motivational quotes. I approach Twitter as a guy who wanted to know what his friends were talking about. All a Twitter is my own journal of what I’ve discovered about Twitter, how it works for me and others, and what you can accomplish with it. Throughout the book, you not only get practical exercises on how Twitter and the various applications and services work; but you also get a philosophy on how to work Twitter, and it’s a philosophy that works.

NTB: If any of the readers would like to talk to you more about Twitter, how should they contact you?

TM: They can find the more professional side of me on ITStudios, but if they want the snark and the sense-of-humor, find me on TeeMonster. You can also hear me speak at CREATE South 2010 on April 17, and on Memorial Day Weekend I will be a guest at Balticon which has evolved, in my opinion, into the BIGGEST tweet-up on the East Coast.

There’s also Bird House Rules, the companion podcast to All a Twitter and Sams Teach Yourself Twitter in 10 Minutes. I ask for feedback there following topics that I’ve covered in the episode. While I do have the show pre-planned, I never shy away from tweets or requests from people who have topics they’d like to hear about but were not addressed in either books or new to Twitter. My door is always open and I love talking shop.

NTB: Thanks for talking to us, Tee.

TM: Thanks for giving me a chance to talk Twitter.

This has been an interview with Tee Morris of TeeMorris.com and ImagineThatStudios.com. Tee is the author of “All a Twitter: A Personal and Professional Guide to Social Networking with Twitter," and its companion podcast “Bird House Rules”.

Dropbox

Our next bit of Nifty Tech is a program called Dropbox. Dropbox is software and a service from a company of the same name. Dropbox allows you to sync and share files across computers and over the internet automatically. You can find them at http://www.dropbox.com. As of this writing, the Dropbox client software is version 0.7.97 for Windows and Mac OS X, which might put some folks off as a sign of an unfinished piece of software. But Dropbox is very usable and useful, and best of all, it is free! Versions are also available for several flavors of Linux. There is even an iPhone app.

When you install Dropbox on a computer, you designate a folder as your Dropbox folder, and allow it to connect to your Dropbox account. What the software actually does is create a background process that watches your Dropbox folder and the corresponding folder on Dropbox’s servers. If either folder is changed, the changes are immediately synced to the other folder. This is great for people with more than one computer, as it means that they can easily keep important files in sync between multiple computers just by putting them in the Dropbox folder. Once a file is in the Dropbox folder, the latest version will be synced to all computers on the account, and the file will be available from any computer by signing on to the Dropbox website with the account’s username and password. All communications are fully encrypted, to protect the confidentiality of your data.

So it syncs your files. So what? There are lots of file sync programs and services out there. What is so special about this one? Well, file syncing is only the tip of the iceberg for Dropbox. It makes an excellent collaboration tool. You can share any folder inside your Dropbox folder with any number of other Dropbox users. When you do this, the folder will show up inside their Dropbox folder and they will be able to see and edit the files in that folder. Any changes they make will be synced to everyone else. Dropbox also keeps track of previous versions of the file so you can always return to a previous good version. This makes Dropbox a great tool for working on collaborative projects. Everyone is always in sync, and your files are always recoverable! By default, Dropbox just keeps track of the last 30 days of changes, but they have a PackRat option that lets you keep unlimited changes.

But let’s say that you have some people you need to share files with that don’t want to create a Dropbox account. Or you have large files that you can’t e-mail that you need to get to a large number of people and you don’t know if they have a Dropbox or not, but they all need the file. Easy-peasy. By default, Dropbox gives you a special Public folder. When you put a file in the Public folder, you can right-click or control-click on the file and choose a menu item called Copy Public Link. This puts the URL of the file on Dropbox’s secure server into your clipboard. Now just e-mail that URL to the people you need to share the file with, and let them download it from the Dropbox servers. One drawback of the current version of Dropbox is that Public Links are only available for individual files, not for folders. If you need to share a folder, either you need to zip it up, or send links for each file in the folder.

Dropbox has another special folder. This one is called Photos, and as you’d expect, it is used for sharing Photos with other users. Create a folder in the Photos section, and put the images you want to share in that folder. Then go to http://www.dropbox.com/photos and select the folder. On the gallery page, there is a link that you can copy and send to anyone you want to share that gallery with. Dropbox even gives you a sample gallery so you can test it for yourself before putting any of your pictures online.

With the basic Dropbox account, you get 2 GB of storage space on the Dropbox servers. For most personal users, this is plenty. But if you need more space, you can purchase the Pro 50 account and get 50 GB of storage for $9.99 a month, or the Pro 100 account that nets you 100 GB of storage for $19.99 a month. Or, you can become a Dropbox Evangelist! For each friend that you invite to join Dropbox that actually joins, both you and your friend receive an additional 250 MB of storage on your Dropbox accounts, but only until you hit 3 GB. Dropbox even gives you tools that let you invite friends directly, or post a link on your web page for referrals. My referral link is https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTIwNzc1NDI5, if you’d like to check out Dropbox and give me some additional storage space.

But the really Nifty thing about Dropbox is the many, many ways you can use it. One friend had a problem with trying to put samples of music in her blog so that her readers can hear what she is working on. Dropbox Public Links. Using iWeb on multiple machines? Put the Domain file in the Dropbox folder and put a symbolic link to it on each of the machines with iWeb. It seems like every time I hear of someone having a problem involving multiple computers or the web, it seems like the solution that comes to mind always starts with Dropbox.

Dropbox is definitely a useful tool to have in your software toolbox if you’ve got multiple computers, need to distribute large files, or do collaborative work. And even if you don’t, it’s free, and it is Nifty Tech.