Tweecious is a new Firefox plugin that automates the conversion of Twitter links to Delicious bookmarks. Once installed, the plugin checks to make sure you're logged into both services and then parses your tweets in order to post the links you tweet to your Delicious account. What's great about this particular add-on is not only how well it works, but that it doesn't require your passwords in order to do so. ]]>
Using Tweecious is simple - just install the Firefox plugin as usual. Then, upon reloading Firefox, you'll need to go through a short two-step procedure to finish setting it up. The first step lets you choose whether or not you want the plugin to backtrack and parse your old tweets, or if it should just start from now on. After setting your preferences, the service verifies you're logged into both accounts and you're ready to go. From that point forward, anything you tweet is posted to Delicious. The links are tagged, too, thanks to an integrated tagging system that uses the Zemanta API.
Where Are the Other Cloud Agents?
Back in December, we wrote about the rise of cloud agents (a term coined by Chris Arkenberg). These agents are automated applications that help us parse through the data swarming around us to provide us with the information we need. At the time, we highlighted a service similar to Tweecious called Twitchboard, another app that also posts the links you tweet to Delicious. According to the Twitchboard site, more services beyond Delicious were "coming soon," but here it is April now, and no others have been integrated. That's disappointing to say the least, but what's even more disappointing is that these sorts of "cloud agents" are so few and far between.
At the time of the previous post, some people missed the overall point, thinking we were raving about a Twitter to Delicious cross-posting app. The truth is, we were excited about this concept of automated agents. Unfortunately, since that time, we've seen very few apps that fit the description. In fact, only a couple of others really come to mind...and to be frank, we're not sure if they even count.
One such service is SocialToo, a "social web companion" which has the ability to automate many tedious Twitter tasks like catching you up on your follows, unfollowing people who didn't follow you back, deleting all your friends, or automatically following people for you. It's the service's automated, "set it and forget it" behavior that we think might allow it to be classified as a cloud agent. Another is "Twollo," a Twitter service that finds like-minded tweeters and follows them for you automatically.
Within the Twitter ecosystem, there are probably slews of others which we just can't think of right now. But do apps that automate tasks within Twitter count as cloud agents? They're not all parsing information to separate signal from noise (well, maybe Twollo is), they're just saving us time. We would love to see some "real" cloud agents emerge that provide more than just automation. We want intelligent cloud agents, too. Know of any?
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