A while ago I discussed the usefulness of third party apps like Hootsuite and TweetDeck for integrating Twitter into your workflow. Twitter apps like Hootsuite or TweetDeck vastly improve the social nature of Twitter. Due to their design they allow people to better participate and follow tweets and conversations than the website Twitter can. If you decide to use Twitter for professional communication I highly recommend finding a third party Twitter app like HootSuite or TweetDeck.
Catherine Voutier approached me shortly after my post, about using Twitter on Netvibes. I am a Netvibes user for my RSS feeds and while I know they have a Twitter integration, I always used the integration to share stories from my RSS feeds with people on Twitter. I had never considered using as I would TweetDeck or Hootsuite. I was intrigued, so I asked Catherine to write up something about her experiences and I repost it here.
Catherine’s Netvibes and Twitter:
I first came about Netvibes earlier this year when I took up the challenge of Library Day in the Life, hosted by Bobbie Newman. This biannual project captures the daily doings of librarians working in all sorts of information environments across the globe. Many social media tools are used and to keep track of them, Bobbie created a public Netvibes dashboard. Netvibes is a monitoring tool which can be used to capture social media updates, rerun search alerts in search engines, keep track of new videos in YouTube and other services, and it can even keep track of incoming emails from various accounts. I was redesigning the evidence section of the RMH library website and I had left the various RSS feeds and other alerting services til last. I hadn’t included videos at that stage either. What could I use to bring all of these together? I tried using Yahoo Pipes but various experiments were unsuccessful. Then I remembered Netvibes – perhaps that would work? So I created an account and made a public page. It was immediately populated with items which were not useful so I went about redesigning it. There are tabs across the top which cover individual social media tools: Twitter, Podcasts and Videos. To add a new page, click on the + on the top right. The tab will be highlighted and this is where you can choose layout. On the top left is a button which says ‘Add Content’ – this is where widgets and feeds are located. You can also add pages that are already populated by choosing topics. To select a widget, click on it and it will ask you if you want to add it. Once added to your dashboard, click on the wheel to edit content. You can easily move the content on the page around by click and drag.
I then read Krafty’s post about using Twitter in everyday workflow and how she prefers to use third party software to read and send tweets. I thought – I wonder if I can use Netvibes to read Twitter conversations? I have a Twitter account but didn’t use it because of its clunky nature. I had to find instructions on how to do it but once I did, it was easy enough to replicate. This is how I did it: I made a basic page for myself and added a Twitter widget to bring up my own account. I then dragged and dropped Krafty’s name onto a blank section of the screen which brought up all her tweets. Krafty participates in a #medlibs chat on Twitter that has had some promotion and she participates and sometimes leads, so it was bound to be mentioned. Looking through Krafty’s tweets I found the #medlibs conversation link and dragged and dropped that onto an empty space on my dashboard – success!! Hooray! Now I can’t wait until the next live chat happens.Below is a snapshot of my still-to-be-completed Netvibes page:Catherine Voutier is the Clinical Librarian at the Royal Melbourne Hospital Health Sciences Library. http://www.netvibes.com/evidencedirect
