Lazyscope – Your Twitter Stream Turned into an RSS Feed

Lazyscope is a desktop tool works kind of like a feed reader for your Twitter account. Along with reading tweets though, you can also use it to keep up with your favorite RSS feeds. It lets you import your Google Reader feeds and subscribe to other blogs as well. The one thing that some potential users may not like about Lazyscope is that it’s an Adobe AIR application, which many people are not very fond of. Regardless, it installs and runs pretty flawlessly; however, usage is another story.

Basic Usage

The first thing I noticed when signing into Lazyscope with my Twitter account, were the annoying pop-up notifications every 20 – 30 seconds. They’re pretty large and obtrusive especially if you’re on a laptop or netbook, so you may want to turn them off immediately in preferences.

However a feature that I did like off the bat was being able to subscribe to any blog that a link is posted from. Whenever you click on a tweet that has a link and it shows you the content, you’ll see a little subscribe button next to the source. You can then keep up with these blogs from within Lazyscope. You’ll see the blogs that you subscribe to in the sidebar underneath your Twitter username.
Lazyscope has a condensed and expanded view. When condensed, you can’t see the sidebar or link preview window. However, when you click on a link it changes to the expanded view. Selected tweets are outlined in green and have 4 rather large options underneath: reply, repost, retweet, favorite.

Lazyscope Preferences

You’ll find the “Preferences” link on the bottom left side of the application. There are not too many settings here (see image below), but you probably want to turn off notifications and the start on login option (which is checked by default).

Import from Google Reader or OPML

When you first sign up you’ll have the option to import your Google Reader account feeds or OPML file. If you choose not to do this now, don’t worry because you can get back here by clicking on the + (plus) sign next to “Home” in the app’s sidebar. For Google Reader you’ll need to enter your ID and password.

Honestly, I feel that Lazyscope lacks the proper functionality to be a dedicated feed reader. Though being able to repost items to Twitter with a preview (as you’ll read about more below), there are many other things missing. For instance, there is no way to mark items as read and when you read an item it remains in the stream. So you have to manually keep up with the items you’re read and haven’t read already.
I do like the ability to see recent posts from the blog you’re reading from below the content. Also, since Lazyscope doesn’t sync with your Google Reader account, you can unsubscribe from feeds in Lazyscope and it won’t affect your actual account. There are only 2 options for feed items: repost, favorite.

Attach Rich Preview

There is a new feature in Lazyscope that lets you add previews to your tweets and it’s definitely the best thing about the app. These previews can be viewed via the “New Twitter” timeline on Twitter.com (you know, via the little arrow on the right of tweets). All you have to do is click “Repost” to enter your tweet text and the tweet (or feed item) will be reposted with a preview.

If you’re wondering how this works, it’s simple. Lazyscope takes an actual snapshot of the item and then posts it to your Twitpic account. The image from Twitpic is then used as the preview within the timeline. So when it’s posted on Twitter, your followers will be able to see what the link contains via an image snapshot (see image below).

Connect With Your Browser

You may see a prompt to connect Lazyscope with your browser, but this is not what you may think it is. It’s not an extension, instead it’s a bookmarklet that you can add to your bookmarks bar to save pages to read or tweet later. Items that you save with the bookmarklet can be found under favorites in Lazyscope.

Final Thoughts

To me, Lazyscope feels clunky and there are many essential features missing. I especially miss conversation view and Twitter search. It is nice that it includes lists though and it’s great for keeping up with a few blogs, but a part from that I really don’t see it as a must-have.

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Link Tips: 20 July 2008

We missed the Link Tips last Sunday, but I will make up for that today with some interesting links for you guys. First stop is the Hierarchy of Social Marketing, an article published at Duct Tape Marketing.

Basically it defends that online marketers and business owners should think before jumping at social media, as opposed to joining whatever social network they are able to, promoting their stuff in whatever way they manage to. Another interesting point, which I have been defending for a while also (check Twitter Less, Blog More!), is the fact that having a website or blog must be at the core of your strategy. The article used a pyramid to illustrate that.

The second article is a compilation with the 50 most influential female bloggers, compiled by the nice folks of NorthXEast. Contrary to what some people might think, the blogosphere is full of intelligent and opinionated female bloggers, and this list is a good place to get started at meeting them.

WebRampage published a checklist for choosing a shared host. Again I covered this in the past (check How to Choose a Web Host), but the author is adding some new points to the factors you should consider before signing up with the hosting company.

Finally, there is a post from the ex-blogger Jason Calacanis outlining the payment and hiring structure behind the Gawker network, owned by Nick Denton. Take a look if you are curious about how those big shot blogs are organizing the pay structure with their writers, and why it is very effective to pay for performance.

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Link Tips: 27 July 2008

It is Sunday, and as usual I got some nice links for you guys to check out. First of all the guys from Performancing are launching an ad network called PerformancingAds. It is open to all publishers, and focused on 125×125 ad blocks. They are have a professional sales team in place to get advertisers aboard, so if you are trying to monetize your blog with that format, it could be worth a try.

Our second stop is the article 50 Useful Blogging Tools for Teachers. Blogging is changing many segments, and teaching is no exception. Some very interesting tools were included.

For the web design lovers out there, there is a cool list titled 50+ Fonts for Big, Bold Headlines. You probably know that the headline is the most important part of your articles, so giving it a proper and appealing font is a must (mine is a bit boring, I know).

Now I am not sure about you, but I have not used Office in a long time. Most of the quick tasks that I need to do can be performed online with Google Docs or similar. If you want to get a grasp of all the useful free online applications, check out 100 Free Online Alternatives to Popular Office Apps. Definitely worth a bookmark.

Finally there is an interesting post by Chris Brogan with 50 topics that marketers could write for their companies. Examples are “How to get the most of our customer service department” and “The best way to recommend an improvement to our product or service.”

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Link Tips: 05 October 2008

This post is coming a bit late on the Sunday, but I didn’t have time earlier, and there were some interesting links to share with you guys so here we go anyway.

First of all my friend Keith Dsouza released the Feed Pauser plugin for WordPress. The plugin let’s you pause your RSS feed while publishing a post. This is useful to make sure that no grammatical mistakes or dead links will be send to your RSS subscribers. You can edit the post how many times you need, and once you are sure it is ready and kinky, you just need to un-pause the feed.

Still taking about WordPress plugins, this past week I came across an interesting post that listed 13 WordPress Plugins You Probably Don’t Use But Should. Not the usual suspects on the list, which is good. Not sure if you need to use them all, but there are some interesting discoveries on that post so check it out.

Then Andy Boyd also wrote an interesting article titled 7 Reasons Why Guest Posting is Integral to Any Linkbuilding Campaign. You probably knew that guest blogging is an efficient promotion technique right? Well, it is also paramount to link building and SEO campaigns according to Andy, and I agree with him.

Finally, you might have come across this huge blog sale already, but you have not, check out Patrick Gavin’s blog (I believe he was the first one to break the news). Basically one dude manage to sell his financial blog for $15 million. No kidding!

The message is clear guys: blog on!

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Link Tips: 16 November 2008

I haven’t done a Link Tips in a while, but since I collected some links over the last couple of weeks I decided to pull one today. First of all there was an interesting guest post on John Chow titled How Planning Can Make You Broke. It is the story of how Alex Shalman managed to create a full eBook in two and half days, and how he used it on a interview to promote his content and boost the number of subscribers on his list. The moral of the story is: action rather than planning! Worth a read.

The second link I want to share with you is titled Web Publishing: Strategies To Help You Stand Out From The Crowd. A guest blogger on SEO Book is offering some nice ideas that you can use to add some flavor to your content or website as a whole.

I am sure that most of you guys use Gmail. The best thing about Google’s email service is the customization options and the advanced features that it packs. Sometimes we don’t even know what is possible to do with that neat piece of script. Thinking about that the Quick Online Tips blog wrote an article titled 5 Little Known Gmail Tips. If you use Gmail check it out.

Now many of you have heard about the benefits of submitting your site or blog to web directories right? The problem is that the worth ones are either too expensive (e.g., Yahoo! Directory) or take too long to get accepted (e.g., Dmoz). The guys from Search Engine People knew about this problem, so they compiled a list with 25 powerful web directories where it is much easier to get listed. I will be trying some of them myself.

Finally, Kevin Muldoon from Blogging Tips wrote an insightful article about the evolution of blogs. Some mainstream publications have started to suggest lately that blogging might be dying. I disagree completely with that view, and I think Kevin is right when he suggests that what we are experiencing is rather an evolution of the blogosphere.

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Link Tips: 07 December 2008

All right folks, I have some links bookmarked that I wanted to share with you, so here we go. The first one a big old admittedly, but I think it is an important change. PC Magazine declared that from January 2009 onwards they will be closing down their print edition and will just have a digital one. Is this signing the inevitable end of all print publications? I believe so. Sure, we are still going to see them around for 10 years or so, but in the end I am sure only digital will be left. By that time we should have electronic paper around though, so the reading experience shouldn’t change. The difference will be that your electronic device will receive its books, news and RSS feeds via the Internet and not from the local magazine stand.

Over at TechVivo there is a useful article titled Top 101 Freeware Apps. The list puts together all the best free applications that you can download and use on your PC (some on your Mac and Linux machine too). They also divided the apps into different categories like Audio, Automation, Compression and the like.

If you have a project or product where you need visitors to take action, you need a landing page right? The guys from Invest are giving away 2 optimized landing page templates to their RSS readers. If need to subscribe to the feed and you will see the link for the download on their articles.

The Gmail fans out there will like to read an article on Lifehacker titled 10 Things You Forgot Gmail Can Do. Did you know that you can launch audio and video chats directly on Gmail, backup your stuff or create a centralized contact list? Pretty cool stuff.

Finally, I also came across an interesting post with 10 Firefox Extensions for Web Analytics. It has a list of all the extensions that you can use to track and analyze web data, like personal surfing habits, Google Analytics numbers, tracking pixels, and hidden information on the pages that you will be visiting.

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