Skip to content
Guest Thinkers

Digesting Twitter: Short Tips for Morning Catch-Up

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

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.


n

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:

n

http://tinyurl.com/34bwp4

n

http://tinyurl.com/2qy4sz

n

http://tinyurl.com/2qr6a8

n

http://tinyurl.com/399qn9

n

n

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

n

http://tinyurl.com/3bkael

n

http://tinyurl.com/3xhmbq

n

http://mashable.com/2008/03…

n

http://tinyurl.com/38yh6c

n

http://tinyurl.com/2qmy3p

n

http://tinyurl.com/2zsd3f

n

http://tinyurl.com/2l9sns

n

http://tinyurl.com/3du44p

n

http://snurl.com/22gpo

n

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

n

http://www.google.com/searc…

n

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

n

http://tinyurl.com/3dw4tu

n

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

n

Follow @garyvee @warriors @Pistachio?

n

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

n

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.

n

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.

n

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Related
{EAV:e47b9f8ac33e6b9b}Last summer I was invited to President Obama’s Twitter Townhall at the White House along with 139 other characters. Despite the grandiose setting and President Obama opening the event with […]
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth). Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay. Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.
The integration of artificial intelligence into public health could have revolutionary implications for the global south—if only it can get online.

Up Next
I have been religiously watching the TEDTalks series, a group of videos produced by TED. Overall I’ve been mostly impressed with the speakers, very cool stuff. Here’s an EXCELLENT spoken […]