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Using Springpad to Organize Your Life

I just heard about a new online tool recently called Springpad. It allows you to quickly organize and share a variety of bits and pieces of information that you collect throughout the day that are important to you and put them into defined structure and places.

springpad-organizing-your-life-info

The other benefit of Springpad is that it harnesses the power of the social networking world and allows you to interact with and share your collections of data with those that are important to you too.

I would say the power of Springpad doesn’t rely in it’s ability to collect your information though, it’s more powerful in the way it allows you to organize, share and complement what you’ve saved with other important information that’s related. This is the part of Springpad that impresses me and is both most helpful to me.

For example, I can save restaurants to my Springpad collection and there are integrated links for making reservations at that restaurant with OpenTable if available and restaurant reviews from Yelp as well.

For homemakers you can quickly and easily make meal-planning tasks as you go about your day, collect recipes, ask friends for cooking information and then allow Springpad to help build your shopping list automatically.

Springpad integrates with Gmail (for synching your contacts and Google calendar events), flickr for sharing and organizing your thoughts with or related to photos, Facebook to help you share information with your Facebook friends and of course with twitter so you can share links and have alarms and reminders sent to your own account.

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Using Google Subscribed Links

The battle for search is still going strong. All search companies are continually tweaking and adjusting their algorithms to help improve their search results and keep those same formulas for being gamed by developers.

 google-subscribed-links

With Microsoft releasing Bing and Google working on their newest search algorithm called Google Caffeine, there’s a lot of effort around incorporating the idea of social search with your organic results.

One of my biggest complaints about search is that my results are impacted by just about everything that’s available on the web. If I’m searching for a question about a certain topic, I don’t want to get results from sites that are completely irrelevant to the goal of my search.

For example, if I’m interested in a question about coffee, I don’t want to get results about people who have talked about sitting around the coffee shop and chatting all day. I may be more interested in the growth regions, bean roasting methods and brewing tasks.

There may be five or ten sites on the Internet that are really great at providing this content and I’d like to just search those sites for my answer. Google provides the ability to do this kind of targeted search tuning by using Google Subscribed Links.

Google has already put together some groupings of sites in categories like Tools, Fun and Games, Lifestyle, and Technology. When you search for certain keywords that have been programmed into these Google Subscribed Links you’ll get special results based on the search links that have been put together for you.

The problem is that Google doesn’t make it easy for people to setup their own search metrics. Developers can create their own, but it’s not as user-friendly I would hope.

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MSNBC Twitter Account Hacked

If you’re quick, you should go follow @MSNBCHeadlines on twitter. They’ve had their account hacked and let’s just say the person that’s in control of the account is having a little fun with the media outlet.

msnbc-twitter-account-hacked

I’m not sure how it is all these accounts on twitter have been getting hacked so prolifically lately. I don’t think all of these people have simple passwords that are getting cracked, so what’s happening? Are there machines infected with other malware that’s collecting login information?

Aside from the major PR issues that a entity like MSNBC is going to have to deal with after this kind identity theft, twitter is going to have to start doing something a little more to protect the security of the network.

If more and more people start to think that they can’t safely click on links or use the micro-blogging service, users are going to start dropping off and going to other channels for the same types of information.

I’m curious, if you’ve had your account hacked recently. Do you have any ideas of what happened? Too simple of a password? Other malware on your computer? What’s the deal?

UPDATE: If you’d like to see some of the tweets that were sent out through the account before it was suspended you can see them on this TechCrunch article about MSNBCHeadlines twitter account getting hacked. Caution NSFW! Language ahead matey!