I want to

Crate for personalised news, not so much

I discovered a site called Crate which is supposed to bring you personalised news direct to your desktop. You simply tell it what keywords you are interested in, any specific websites, people from Twitter, that sort of stuff. It then goes away and brings you back material. Hopefully it's material that you'll find interesting, but don't hold your breath. 

I gave my Crate a bunch of useful keywords, such as internet search, search engines, the names of various different engines and so on. I gave it a couple of search engine related websites that I use, and 5 Twitter accounts. That's a reasonable amount to go on I think, so I was quite hopeful that I might get some useful information back. How did it work? Well, today I've had 3 results - one of which took me to a site that had nothing to do with the title of the article, and two posts on content marketing. Yesterday I had 17 links, mostly again about content marketing, a job advert, a news item that was nothing about my subjects of interest, '5 qualities of the best places to work' (why, I have no idea) and a similar set of results for the day before. In other words, a complete waste of my time. Once you find something useful, there's only a couple of ways of sharing it - via Twitter (but it doesn't realise that there's a character limit, so you have to do a lot of editing yourself) or Buffer, which to be honest isn't very high up on my radar. How about Facebook? Pinterest? LinkedIn? (Yes, I know you can do that via Buffer, but it's a paid product with a poor free version, so it doesn't count.)

What's really irritating is that there isn't even an option to go into the system and tell it that you don't like a particular result, so there's no way of training it on what to look for next, or how to improve its offerings. Very disappointing, and I'll be sticking with Mention, Scoop.it, Paper.li and so on.

Notifier to tell people you're talking about them

Most of the time we spend our time trying to find references to our posts, blogs, web sites and so on. However, there's a nice free little tool out there called Notifier by Content.Io which works the other way around. You simply add in @handles and it then does the job of contacting the person you're talking about to let them know. Very simple and quite elegant. 

Nuzzel

If you're wondering why you want to follow lots of people on Twitter and Facebook then Nuzzel will give you a good answer. Give it details of your social media accounts and it will then go off and find out which stories are catching fire in your network, giving you the chance to make sure that you're fully caught up with them. If you're short on time, this is a great tool to use.

Swayy makes social media easier

Want to save time, be more effective and still share stuff with friends and colleagues? Then you might want to take a look at Swayy. Basically you connect your different social media accounts to it, and it then goes through them, finding interesting stories for you, based upon what the people that you follow are talking about. Swayy suggests topics that you might be interested in, based on your profile, and you can add to this collection or remove false hits.

It's really easy to share stories with different networks with a mouse click, and you can change the message that accompanies the link. Swayy also suggests useful hashtags as well. Once you have shared a piece of content it disappears from your newsfeed, which I thought was going to be a problem, but it's simply been moved to an analytics section, where you can see how many people have clicked on the link.

The interface is really easy to use - my only gripe is that the stories are in the usual magazine type blocks, and you can only see one or two stories at a time, so it's a little bit labourious wandering through the list and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. However, that aside this is actually a really nice tool. It won't replace Zite for me, but if they come up with a tablet based version I am definately there!

eduClipper - a Pinterest for schools

If Pinterest is blocked in your organisation for some reason or another - especially if you're a school, then you might want to consider eduClipper. 'Clip anything, share everything' is its motto, and so it may well be an appropriate tool - the emphasis is obviously on education, and you can create accounts for teachers and students. I've not done so myself, so this review is based on looking at the front page, but it may be worth exploring - if you do, please leave a comment!

Kona – Organize, discuss, and get things done together with your groups. Tasks, Events, Files, Messaging, and more.

via www.kona.com

Another small work/family/friends/group application to organise, discover and get things done together. Looks like a nice app - these things are certainly in a position to take on the more traditional role of Wikis I think to get stuff done. Not played with this myself, so cannot comment further.

Tracky

The Open Social Collaboration Platform "Connect, collaborate, done" It's a multi functional 'to do' tool for groups, large or small. Share the same resource to work on things together.

Minus

Share simply. Share files up to 200 MB • Unlimited Storage and Downloads • Share via the Web, Mobile and Desktop

VentureBox Assist

VentureBox Assist puts your client information in a single, secure online location.   Share documents, track history and assign tasks.   Assist makes life easier for client-oriented businesses. Watch the video | Sign up for free

list.ly

Lists made easy social fun!. Quick and easy way to create lists in conjunction with friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter. These are lists of things - products, places, services, sites etc, rather than people you follow.