Webcoda Blog

Does Twitter live up to the hype? As with most things that depends on who you are, what you do and how you do it.

A lot of people who have tried Twitter have written it off as a waste of time citing headlines such as Twitter tweets are 40% 'babble'.

That may be true but 80% of TV and pop music are rubbish but there is still enough decent stuff that we can just take what we like and ignore the rest.

This is why I believe Twitter works…

You can follow only people you want to hear from.

I pick up lot’s of great news and tips about web development, current affairs, politics etc because I follow people who are in the know. There are no ads and if someone is wasting my time I stop following them.

The information comes in small bite size chunks

We live in the era of the sound bite. So many people only skim headlines anyway as so much news is free online. A lot of the time a Tweet is a link to a story. If you like a Tweet, you can click on the link and read the full story.

From a marketers point of view it is easier to Tweet than to create newsletters.

Dell has made over 3 million dollars from Twitter related sales. It costs nothing but someone’s time. Think about the effort that goes into sending newsletters. Newsletters is the tried and true method for keeping customers engaged but you cant send more than one marketing newsletter every few days without it looking like Spam. Twitter can be used to have a continuous dialog with customers reminding them about you and your services or products.

As a consumer, the information comes to me

I don’t have to go looking for the news I want. It arrives by itself, tailored to my interests.

Twitter is a real time barometer of what’s going on

Use tools like TwitScoop to see what is happening in the world in real time. We no longer live in an age where only marketers can spot the trends. Now anyone can.

Twitter is an amazing tool and definitely will have it’s place on the internet for a while to come. It can also be a big time suck.
After all if you listen to Tim Ferris, the author of The 4-hour work week we shouldn’t even be listening or watching the news. Oddly enough though, even he is on Twitter. - http://twitter.com/tferriss
I guess if you only work 4 hours a day, you probably have plenty of time to spend on Twitter.

It’s almost free because you need to be using the premier edition of Google Apps which is $50 per user per year- http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

If you use Google Apps Premier, Outlook 2003 or 2007 and have an iPhone and would like to sync your email, contacts and calendar then this article is for you. The rest of you will just have to imagine what it would be like.

Just to be clear here when I say Sync, I mean true 2 way sync. If I delete a contact on my phone I want that contact deleted in my Gmail and in my Outlook. Same if I delete from Outlook or Gmail.

Google is the hub. We sync iPhone to Google and Outlook to Google.

Syncing iPhone to Google

Overview here

Email

You probably already have email set up – Instructions here. This works fine and there is nothing to change.

Calendar and Contacts

Although there are third party tools out there such as Neuvasync and Soocial which are pretty good, they didn’t seem to offer anything that Google wasn’t offering out of the box.

To configure iPhone Cal and Contacts follow these instructions. - http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740

The only extra thing worth noting is that if you have multiple calendars or share calendars with other people in Google,

(i.e I can see my wife's google calendar and she can see mine.) you can choose which calendars to sync on the iPhone by following instructions here -

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139206&ctx=sibling

 

If you are not sharing calendars then you are missing a great feature of gmail.

 

Syncing Outlook to Google

Google has just released Apps Sync for Outlook.

All the info you need is here

Note that this will set up a new Outlook profile for you. The old profile will remain intact.

My biggest gripe is that I can’t see my shared calendars in Outlook. I hope they change this.

Second biggest is that filters in gmail don’t affect Outlook. So you have to set up rules in Outlook if you want mail to go into specific folders.

The problem with this of course is that if you change your pc you lose your rules and will need to migrate them manually.

 

Tips

Make sure you have everything backed up before you sync anything. The iPhone deletes all your contacts when you set up a new sync account.

What I did was get all my contacts on Gmail first and back gmail contacts up. This is your master list.

You can back up your contacts to gmail by using iTunes – Instructions here

The Google Apps sync lets you import your contacts/calendar from your old profile. When you do your first sync they will be copied up to gmail.

You will most likely end up with duplicates (we did). Fortunately gmail has merge function. I couldn’t see a way around this.

When you update an event on your iPhone it can take up to an hr to display in Gmail so be patient.

Issues

I did have some issues with this. The worst being that my Outlook mail stopped syncing and I had to reset up another profile and re-download all my mail again. It’s worked properly for a couple of days now so I’ll update if something more happens.