Twitter Poster and User Groups...

Just so all of you readers are educated a bit more on Twitter....

Maybe you want to join Twitter, but don't want me to be your only friend?
Go to twitterposter.com and see the most followed people on Twitter. The bigger the picture, the more popular they are. I started following a few of the larger pictures and a majority of them provide value to my Snitter feed. (iJustine, who is incredibly popular, is completely worthless, but that is a post for a different time)

Also, if you want to bring Twitter to your local area, you can start a blog at twitterusergroup.com.
Thanks to their convenient Wordpress templates, you can use a blog to create meet ups and local events for your area.

Mine is at elroy.twitterusergroup.com. I haven't added anything yet and frankly am not sure what I am going to do with it.
But, it is there....

So, hopefully that will help all of you ease your way in Twitter.

What I want: Instant RSS to e-mail

I know that I preach the gospel of RSS feeds, Twitter, Snitter and the like, but what I really want is an instant RSS to e-mail agent/website.

Current options:
sendmerss.com
r-mail.org
feedblitz.com
rssfwd.com
feedburner.com

There are certain feeds that I would prefer to read via e-mail. Having a Treo and gmail IMAP accounts, it would be great to have instantaneous information for certain things. For instance, my future wife's Twitter feed. Having her updates e-mailed to me would be great. I don't want text messages or IM's.

Also, Facebook status updates. I don't ever sign on, but I subscribe to the RSS feed for my friends' status updates.

Knowing these things in real time seems important to me.

The above websites are lacking in one main area: speed.

R-mail.org is the only one that will deliver multiple e-mails a day. The rest are just a digest format for the last 24 hours. But, once again, r-mail is slow. I was receiving the individual r-mail feed e-mails hours after I would see them in Google Reader.

On a side note, I think Google Reader is also slow, because I see updates in Snitter way before the feed hits Google Reader. Perhaps it is a feedburner problem.

Maybe I could use a combination of Outlook 2007, which reads RSS feeds, and an auto forward rule? I haven't looked into that yet. Or maybe Thunderbird?

This goes in line with the concept of gmail being the center of your universe as written about by Steve Rubel: HERE

Anyway, being part of the "MTV generation" that is engrossed in social networking, real-time information is important. Look at the blogging community. Everyone wants to be the first to break a story whether it is about Britney Spears, the latest Apple product, or whatever else is hot at the time. Although, it may not be "breaking news" for anyone but me to see the latest status update for a friend, it may be important enough that I want to respond in a relevant time period.

So, if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Snitter

Since I know all of your are using Twitter after I previously spoke of its usefulness, I want to make sure you are all using Snitter.
Snitter is a great windows client for Twitter built on Adobe's AIR. AIR is an effort to bring internet applications to the desktop.

Snitter gives you all the features of the twitter website, but gives you a much better interface. It does direct messages, replies, favoriting, creating tinyurl's, a transparency feature, and much more.

My favorite part of Snitter is the Growl-like pop ups when new tweets arrive. As I saw one tweet earlier today state, Snitter really does improve your speed reading when it pops up 5 messages at a time.


As a side note, Twitterrific is a great client for you Mac OS X users. If I used OS X on a daily basis, I'd be all over Twitterrific.