What Were You Doing Last Year?

Timehop (Photo credit: dklimke)

If you're like me, you don't know.  Hey, sometimes I can't even remember what I did last week.  Or yesterday.  Or earlier this morning...

OK, maybe it's not that bad, but sometimes I do have to stop and really think about it, and I definitely do not remember what I was doing last year.  So, I just signed up for Timehop.  It's a FREE service that searches your Facebook status, Twitter updates, and other online services and sends a daily email letting you know what you were talking about and doing a year ago. 

Timehop turns your web services into a time capsule. Everything you post today becomes a note for the future!

Sounds like fun, doesn't it?  

Related articles

• Timehop social media aggregator adds Pinterest-style boards for saving your favorite memories (theverge.com)
• Timehop Revives Old Memories from Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter (xconomy.com)
• Want to know what were you doing a year ago, exactly this date? (improvesocialnetworking.wordpress.com)

Publish Your Own Newspaper (Sort of)

This is so cool!  Paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag and publish every 24 hours - or change the frequency if you'd rather have morning, evening or even weekly editions.  It's currently an alpha version which means new features are being added regularly, and they welcome feedback.

It's free to sign up, and you can sign in with facebook or twitter, then choose what you want included in your newspaper - use your twitter account, a list, or even a specific #tag.  I just went with my twitter feed and came up with The bcmom Daily. The title of the newspaper can be changed, but I'm going with that for now.

What does paper.li do to make a newspaper?
Publishing a newspaper is no small task! Here is an overview of all the things paper.li does in the background for you:

• extract all tweets that include URLs
  
• extract the content found on these URLs:
  
  • text, e.g. blog post, newspaper article
    
  • photo, e.g. Flickr, yfrog, Twitpic, ...
    
  • video, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, ...
    
• analyze the extracted text for topic, e.g. Politics, Technology, ...
  
• surface the day's most relevant articles (using paper.li magic)
  
• construct a newspaper frontpage using the filtered articles, photos and videos
  

Paper.li archives all editions, so you can go back and read them any time you want.  You can send out automatic tweets (if you want to) every time the paper is updated, include a widget on your blog, create custom papers and more.  I haven't explored it all yet.  I just thought it was super cool and had to share.  Check it out.  Publish your own paper.  Subscribe to mine.  Have fun.

Twitter Followers on Your Twitter Background

I'm thinking it's about time for a new background for my twitter page, but I'm not sure what I want.  Do I want to create a custom background, which would take some kind of idea and artistic talent?  Or do I just want to pick a free one from one of the many sites that offer them?  I still haven't decided, but I noticed one of the people I follow on twitter was using a background from Twilk - so I had to check it out.

It looks like fun.  Basically you sign in with twitter, and Twilk creates you a background made up of the profile photos of the people you follow, or your followers, or both - however you want to set it up.  The more you mention, retweet, or interact with someone, the more they should show up in your background.

I haven't decided if I'm going to try it or not, but it does offer a very unique background for everyone - unless, as someone said, you have the exact same followers and interact with them the exact same way as someone else does - highly unlikely.

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Changes in my Feed

Image via CrunchBase

I've been using twitterfeed for a while now.  I love it, because it automatically tweets my blog posts.  You just have to add your blog's RSS and enter your twitter information, and you're good to go.  The only problem is, my posts stopped showing up on twitter.  I finally figured it out - I had to change my twitter password, so twitterfeed was using the wrong password, and couldn't post to twitter.  All these automatic things are great, but if anything changes, you have to remember to make those changes everywhere.

The only problem is, that since I've updated my twitter password, and twitterfeed has told me it checks out OK, only one post has actually been tweeted.  So far I've only posted on my other blog Beth & Cory's Mom, so this post is mostly a test to see if this feed is working properly. 

After reading the following related articles, I'm thinking I might start using Google's Feedburner to tweet my posts.  Decisions, decisions.

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• Goodbye Twitterfeed, Hello Google (labnol.org)
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Personalize Your Twitter

There are about a dozen themes you can choose from on Twitter. They're not bad, but if those are the only backgrounds you have to choose from, that means that 1 in 12 twitter users will have the same twitter theme, minimum. Kind of like going to the big ball only to find out that a whole bunch of other people are wearing the same dress. So what do you do if you want your twitter page to stand out from the rest? Luckily you can upload your own background image.

I think the best advice is to personalize your twitter profile as explained on BenSpark.com. He did mention something about making a template available, but I don't know where things stand on that. Even without the template, I'm pretty sure I can create my own personal Twitter background, if I can only figure out what I want and then take the time to do it. Drew's is really cool - be sure to check it out.

Since I haven't yet created my very own background, I tried Flickr my background which uses your latest Flickr photo as your Twitter background. That's pretty neat, because it changes every time you upload new photos to Flickr. The downside is that it changes every time you upload new photos to Flickr - so your Twitter page won't be easily recognizable and something that people will associate with you. I think it's best to create or choose something and then stick with it a while.

This weekend, since I still haven't created my own, I tried a nice Twitter background from Twitterimage.com. They have some nice free images. They also offer professionally designed custom backgrounds.

And here's another source for Twitter backgrounds - U Stand Out. You can simply grab the image file and upload that to twitter, or grab the Photoshop file and customize it. Add your own pictures, text, etc.

follow me on Twitter - and please don't criticize my Twitter background, because for some reason Twitter keeps eating it.