How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that's what we're trying to do these days - but all these new applications and services don't have to be crammed into our heads and lives as separate things to try out and remember.
Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.
AideRSS plus Snacker
RSS news ticker Snackr was an app that people either loved or hated when we first wrote about it here. The attractive Adobe AIR interface is now even more compelling now that you can sync it with your Google Reader account (as of last week). One of the best uses we've found for this ever-flowing stream of news though has been to fill it up with "best of" feeds from AideRSS. AideRSS is an app we've written about over and over again here because it's just so darned useful and cool.
Put the two together though and you've got a stream of just the breakout hits from high traffic feeds. We enjoy and recommend reading the top stories on topics like the semantic web, mobile and recommendation technology through Snackr - but we're sure you can build your own easily.
Ma.gnolia (or Del.icio.us) plus Feed.Informer
You can do a whole lot of different things with social bookmarking tools like Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us, probably including some things most readers here aren't familiar with. One of our favorite things though is to pick a particular tag from your account and run the RSS feed from that tag through a handy little service called Feed.informer.
You can display any amount of the feed on a web page with just a few lines of embed code, including the "notes" field for your tag as editorial or summary information. The result is a little news section for your website, powered by your social bookmarking tool. It's a great way to continue sharing found items online that don't warrant an entire blog post.
FriendFeed and MuxTape plus FluidApp
We wrote here earlier this year about a fabulous mashup of mixtape service Muxtape and single-app browser creation tool for Mac called FluidApp, but it's also really useful to combine FriendFeed and Fluid.
Most of the other standalone FriendFeed apps are hard to use (excluding the wonderful mobile app FFtoGo) but putting your friends' feeds and conversation in a standalone browser makes it easy to follow along without losing the FF tab in your browser. FriendFeed's auto-updating keeps the dedicated browser up to date and the FF favicon looks great in your dock.
Single app browsers fall into the "seems stupid until you try it" category, but put the right app in there and you'll enjoy it.
Windows users can check out Bubbles, a service that was reviewed and discussed recently at Download Squad.
Facebook plus Dapper
The RSS extraction tool Dapper is really powerful, once you figure out how and why to use it. Here's a 4 minute screencast we recorded about how to use Dapper but the sky's the limit with what you can do with this free tool.
One of the things we've done with it lately is scrape birthday notifications out of Facebook. Not everyone logs into Facebook everyday, but people tend to put their real birthdays into their profiles there. It's really nice to get those birthday notifications by RSS in another setting that you spend time in more regularly. Step by step instructions for doing so are available here.
We asked around and got some input from friends about what apps they like to use together. The responses ranged from combinations aimed to increase productivity to making the most of music listening. Here are some of our favorites.
Local Portland tech blogger Rick Turoczy says he likes to use Twitter search (formerly Summize), combined with Yahoo! Pipes and RSS to SMS service Pingie. We're not sure what he does with those apps together, but the magic results in his getting a lot of industry news before mainstream media outlets do.
MicroISV consultant Bob Walsh makes the most of his fleeting thoughts by sending voice recordings through Jott over to "memory extender" EverNote and "thence to various programs on my Mac." That's the kind of thing many of us have probably envisioned doing, we're glad it's working for Bob.
Susan Kirkpatrick (no relation) is a prolific multi-media blogger. How does she do it? [I] "send a blog post with a picture attachment via email to Utterz; it posts to Flickr, WordPress, Pownce and Twitter." We haven't used it a lot ourselves, but Utterz is pretty impressive and we here rumors that there is even more sophisticated developments being worked on behind the scenes there, too.
Virginie De Bel Air says she likes Last.fm + SonicLiving, a service that tracks your favorites on iTunes, Last.fm or Pandora and notifies you when those bands are coming to perform in your area. Utilitarian and rock and roll! We hadn't seen SonicLiving before.
Security and IT exec Greg Hughes likes to let his hair down and shout Shazam! sometimes. Specifically, Hughes says he finds himself using the Shazam music identification app to identify a song he hears and then Pandora to discover more that's related. All on the iPhone, too.
What are your favorite apps to use together? There are so many new apps that launch everyday, we can't imagine the infinite permutations that users could come up with. Putting together multiple apps usually implies though that you're fairly comfortable with one or both of them, that they are equipped to live as something other than a walled garden and that each has stood enough of a test for users to believe they are stable enough to smoosh together.
Productivity? Fun? A combination of both, perhaps? We'd love to know what your favorite apps are to run together.
Photo: "Web 2.0 Crawl Yahoo Brickhouse: Nate Westheimer of BricaBox, Dave McClure, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme" by Brian Solis. Just imagine how great it would be if these app guys worked together!
Comments
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Right now I'm using soup.io as an aggregator for content streams like last.fm, goodreads, allconsuming. I tried using Tumblr, but it doesn't have full-text output of the input feed (disappointing). But soup.io rocks at that! So it is a great service with which to combine content streams into one site.
Posted by: Richard MacManus
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July 30, 2008 6:10 PM
Thanks to Susan for the nod. I don't know how you got wind of our developments, but, it's true, Utterz is working on some new and exciting apps and features. Stay tuned:)
Aaron Burcell
Posted by: Aaro Burcell | July 30, 2008 6:36 PM
Man, there are a grip of good ideas here. I've been using Muxtape with Fluid, but I haven't been connecting it with FriendFeed!
Reminds me of Alex's post about the future of the web being an intersection of web services. Now, if there were only some services that would make mashing them together easier. Not talking like Pipes, although I love me some Pipes.
Posted by: Justin Kistner | July 30, 2008 7:15 PM
I've been feeding aiderss into a few different scenario's and I like some of the other ideas presented. It reminds of what makes *nix so powerful even today, pipes (|), but much prettier and intuitive. Architects and developers would be well served to remember that model and apply it to webtoolkit of today.
Posted by: JamieD | July 30, 2008 7:52 PM
Cool "mashups" of applications! One such combo I use every single day is through extracting the gas prices from MSN Autos using Feedity to find a gas station near me with the lowest price. I can access the RSS feed on my mobile from anywhere, anytime. It is one of the most practical "mashup" in my daily life ;)
Posted by: Chris Rodd, CA | July 30, 2008 7:58 PM
Del.icio.us & Delish on the Mac, a MUST HAVE combo.
I have over 3,900 articles tagged in Del.icio.us. When I used to try and find my good articles on a saved topic Del.icio.us would give me a text list of the page titles. I was left scratching my head why I had saved many of them. With Delish I am looking at snapshots of the actual pages. I have a 30" monitor so I set it to show 4 snapshots across. I can clearly see and read each pages content as I scroll through. I can quickly see where I saw the value and grab the ones I need.
Delish $9.00
http://pinepointsoftware.com/delish/site/
Posted by: Charles Willson | July 30, 2008 8:01 PM
Awesome post, Marshall.
If I built something with Gabe and Dave I think my head would explode with awesomeness...
As for awesome product combos, I'm just starting to play around with Drop.io's Twitter integration and I think it's super useful. It Tweets out anything you add to your drop, so I can just call into my drop, leave a message, and then Tweet out some audio... but the same goes for sending a photo or video or whatever other kind of media.
Again, good thought provoking post. See you!
Posted by: Nate Westheimer | July 30, 2008 8:17 PM
At the risk of seeming "less mysterious," I'll explain what I do with Twitter Search, Yahoo! Pipes, and Pingie.
Twitter's track feature (which used to send users SMS messages based on certain keywords the user provided) has been broken for a long time, and it doesn't show any signs of recovering soon.
So using that combination of tools, I can search for a specific term or terms, grab the RSS feed, run it through pipes if I need to concatenate feeds or create conditional filters, and then send the resulting RSS feed to Pingie, which sends me an SMS message whenever that search terms appears in a tweet.
If you're just looking for specific words (like your username for replies and mentions), you can skip the Pipes and go straight from the search RSS feed to Pingie.
Want IM alerts instead of SMS? Use IMfeeds instead of Pingie.
Slow and imperfect but better than no track at all. ;)
Posted by: Rick Turoczy
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July 30, 2008 9:48 PM
Nice post Marshall. I'll have to play with some of these. I grabbed the test version of Snackr with Reader integration... but they ask for your login credentials which makes it a no go for me. Why aren't people using the Google Authentication API for this stuff? grrr....
Posted by: rickg | July 30, 2008 11:46 PM
Did you have a chance to look at my app: MyJugaad.in?
I believe it falls under the same category of multi web apps.
Posted by: Paras Chopra | July 31, 2008 12:52 AM
I am using Yahoo Pipes to customize the slashDot feed and adapt it to my interests (contained as tags in del.icio.us). It doesn't work perfectly :( but it is a nice idea :)
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=3C3QP3U83RGMLS0Fyp1_DQ
Posted by: Milan Stankovic | July 31, 2008 7:51 AM
Um...interesting article but have to admit, I'm really distracted by the fact that the first sentence seems to be referencing an incredibly tasteless joke...
Posted by: Bob | July 31, 2008 9:00 AM
Oh wow, this is kinda interesting. I'd never tried anything link this before. Now, I think I should also give this a try.
Posted by: United Voices | July 31, 2008 10:29 AM
Well, I del.icio.us most of the time and quite frequently the whole day.
Posted by: Sangesh | July 31, 2008 10:31 AM
"Most of the other standalone FriendFeed apps are hard to use"... Can you please tell me if you have tried NoiseRiver, and if so, what's hard in it? :)
Posted by: directeur | July 31, 2008 10:35 AM
I almost forgot my favorite combo! Yahoo! Pipes and AideRSS. Mmmm...
Posted by: Justin Kistner | July 31, 2008 10:43 AM
Jott + Vitalist for managing to-dos.
Posted by: Chris | July 31, 2008 12:29 PM
Gmail + remember the milk for todos. You can set up RTM to send reminders both via SMS and Gchat. And both google calendar and RTM have providers for lightning/sunbird (mozilla's calendaring app) so its pretty sweet setup.
Posted by: Nadine | July 31, 2008 3:54 PM
Wow, this is such thoughtful guide. All these tools alone has its own power and use but together with appropriate partner, the combo is more friendlier and make internet more productive.
BTW, I have liked the idea of putting social bookmarking and feed informer together.
Thanks for sharing !!!
Phoenix2Life
Posted by: Phoenix2Life | July 31, 2008 8:36 PM
I will recommend: Socialthing plus Ping.fm
Posted by: Khanh Le | August 2, 2008 3:31 AM
jott to remember the milk and then remember the milk to my igoogle page
or jott to backpackit but that api was taken down temporarily... also what works really well is kwiry, so i can text through kwiry or call through jott and have it go to my gmail or to rtm.
Posted by: adang | August 2, 2008 11:02 AM
I would recommend Socialbrowse plus stumbleupon in tandem with a feed reader (Google Reader as my preference).
Posted by: NatyB88 | August 10, 2008 1:10 AM