If you’ve got a problem, yo I’ll solve it

But will Twitter check out the hook when my DJ revolves it?

So basically, my problem is this: for people like me, who still pay attention to individual new Twitter followers, it’s very difficult to tell at a glance from the ‘new follower email notification’ whether or not I should consider following-back straight away. I might stop email notification of new followers if I start picking them up at a rate of knots, but at the moment I can still cope with the flow.

Here’s my suggestion: When Twitter sends you an email saying you’ve got a new follower, how about including that person’s location, web address and bio (which most people fill out unless they’re trying to be terribly mysterious) and their last three tweets to give a flavour of what they’re like — essentially an overview that will save me from having to click through to decide whether or not to follow them back.

Twitlove

Twitter continues to delight and amaze me, despite the absence of The Perfect Twitter Client™. Tangential software blathering alert– I use Twitterific and am generally quite happy with it, though in the style of the dysfunctional on again, off again relationship, I do sometimes find myself seduced all over again by Twhirl‘s superior feature set (integration with TwitPic and Friendfeed, easy retweeting and search, along with a slew of other nice-to-haves). Inevitably though, Twhirl’s look and feel and lack of keyboard shortcuts start to grate; I return to salve my punished eyes in the balm that is Twitterific, and the cycle begins anew.

Despite the hype and obvious love from others, I cannot bring myself to enjoy using TweetDeck – it is entirely too overwhelming and claustrophobic – a great idea, poorly executed. Of course, my perception of TweetDeck and Twhirl may be skewed by the fact that I’m still on my old faithful PowerBook G4, which doesn’t seem to cope well with the memory-hogging AIR apps.

Anyway. Twitter is a box of delights, and one of the coolest things about it is the occasional serendipitous finding of friends and other interesting people; most recently David Tebbutt, who I first came across at the beginning of my explorations into organised productivity. David, now a researcher/analyst of human and environmental aspects of computing, is one of the brains behind the information capture/planning application BrainStorm, a tool I used for a while back in the day before I made the switch and began my slow migration from kGTD to OmniFocus to Things — which it must be said is just a *joy* to use on Mac and iPhone. Aaaand I’m back to the software blathering. Whoops.

My life in clouds

For a long time, I've resisted the allure of the data cloud, feeling quite uneasy at the thought of my information not being on a system under my control. Not that I'm a remotely capable sysadmin (the clue's in the phrase 'wannabe geek'), but there was a certain sense of security that came from knowing the intangible stuff that essentially makes up my life could be physically located on a tangible piece of hardware that I held in my hands.

It was also difficult, as a South African who remembers the painfully slow and extortionately priced bandwidth of my youth (which sadly persist to this day), to get over the hump of committing to a service which would require me to be online for significant amounts of time in order to use it. But my resistance slowly wore down, and a few years ago I took my first tentative steps into the cloud.

Recycling software licences

As a hardcore software junkie, I revel in third party apps. Since my switch to Macs in 2004, I’ve bought licences for dozens of OS X apps, and I suppose as can be expected, I’ve outgrown some of them as my career focus has changed and my approach to personal workflow has evolved.

My sense of thriftiness and a general aversion to wastefulness means I hate to just AppZap something that still has a shelf-life. Ideally, I’d like to give my licences for apps I’ve outgrown to people who could use them… think, hand-me-down clothing in a large family, or passing on pre-loved stuff via networks like Freecycle.

It occurred to me that some software houses might not object to a request from me to transfer the licence to their app; after all, I’m sure they’d rather have active, happy users whose feedback will contribute to the overall development of the product, or who will at the very least spread the word to their friends, rather than inactive users who skew stats and don’t return any value beyond the initial fee (like yours truly). Personally, I think it would be great if there was some sort of licence-trading site which would let you post licences for grabs or trade with other users with the blessing of the software developers behind the products, so that the recipients could still benefit from support services and future upgrades, etc.

I’ve started mailing the companies in question, and so far, I’ve got one positive response from Llamagraphics, whose Life Balance software was the first step in my personal productivity journey. At the time, Life Balance didn’t offer synching between its calendar and iCal, so I switched over to kGTD + OmniOutliner Pro when Ethan Schoonover released his scripts, and I’m now a mostly happy OmniFocus user.

LifeBalance 4.0, released last week, now has iCal sync built-in, but it’s about two years too late for me to take an active interest. So if you would like a licence for Life Balance 3.x, which will allow you to upgrade to 4.0 at a discount, drop me a line at bk at basheerakhan dot com.

When three loves collide

I <3 Threadless, I <3 Basecamp and they <3 each other. Yay.

(That last link is to a user testimonial that offers a cool behind-the-scenes look at Threadless HQ).

FYI: I use Basecamp to manage all my projects, and even my most email-bound clients have all taken to it with practically no learning curve whatsoever.

, they’ll show me some affiliate love if you do.

Betas

I just signed up for the Skitch beta, having received my invitation today after a few weeks’ wait. Not quite sure how I came to hear about it, but I do recall the referrer waxing lyrical about the beauty of the application icon, and deservedly so. Having actually nabbed my username of choice, it occurs to me that for me, relative earliness of adoption can be measured by whether or not I can get ‘Bash’ as a username, and what variations on the theme I need to wangle if not. (Hence my Last.fm username.)