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Digesting Twitter: Short Tips for Morning Catch-Up

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Often I’ll find myself spending 20-60 minutes a day in a situation where I have some time to kill and my phone. Given the value I get from Twitter (breaking news and friend updates mixxed together) and the way I use twitter (not reading every tweet, just catching it when I can), I’ll often use this time to twitter.

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Twitter is famous for cell phone use, but more for SMS – which is not my style; I use three tools: m.twitter.com, TwitterBerry, and my mobile browser. Given that m.twitter doesn’t record where you where in the updates, visiting links as they look interesting and then going back and finding your place can be a real hassle.  I create a twitter digest. I go through and make an email draft of links that look good, notes i want to keep, or ideas I have. Here’s an example of yesterday morning’s digest:

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http://tinyurl.com/34bwp4

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http://tinyurl.com/2qy4sz

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http://tinyurl.com/2qr6a8

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http://tinyurl.com/399qn9

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jowyang: Quotable looks about half accurate for this thread http://tinyurl.com/3yzcol 3 minutes ago

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http://tinyurl.com/3bkael

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http://tinyurl.com/3xhmbq

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http://mashable.com/2008/03…

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http://tinyurl.com/38yh6c

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http://tinyurl.com/2qmy3p

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http://tinyurl.com/2zsd3f

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http://tinyurl.com/2l9sns

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http://tinyurl.com/3du44p

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http://snurl.com/22gpo

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apenny: Tyler Perry (20 Mill movie this weekend) is such a fabulous rags to riches tale.

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http://www.google.com/searc…

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http://tinyurl.com/3384fe (doesn’t display on blackberry? Wtf ?)

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http://tinyurl.com/3dw4tu

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rycaut: I wax a bit surprised to OH people complaining about the nudity which I think says more about Americans than the filmmakers about 11 hours ago
nrycaut: btw The Bank Job was quite good if not particularly surprising (not The Usual Suspects but a fun period crime caper) about 11 hours ago

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Follow @garyvee @warriors @Pistachio?

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–8pm last night–
nSent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

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As you can see, it’s mostly links, mixed in with notes about two films I want to see and a service I wanted to try but had yet to. I wanted to reply to some messages that I saw while making this digest, when that happened I switched to TwitterBerry (so as not to lose my place) and posted the reply. Then it’s simply an action of visiting these sites in order until something else needs to be done – if I get a chance to do something more productive, I email the unfinished list to myself for checking when I get back to my machine.

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Creating this digest takes me 10-20 minutes depending on volume and interestingness of my friends, and it’s easy to make sure I see everything interesting tweeted over a period of time. Also, in case you’re wondering, the above digest represents 13 hours of activity.

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