Sharing interesting posts from Google Reader on Twitter Jun 29, 2009

Jitbit has a Twitter account for quite some time now, where I post my own twits along with the company official news, releases and blog announcements.

All the official stuff is published via Twitterfeed, a great service that automatically twits your RSS-entries to your Twitter account. We have a news feed, a blog and a release-log feed, and all of them are automatically published to Twitter whenever a new item appears. So if you have a blog or a newsfeed - Twitterfeed is a must-have tool for you.

Now, I've recently thought of an efficient way to "retwit" (share on Twitter) the interesting links I stumble on in my Google Reader. Usually, once you've found a great article to share you have to (1) click the article in Reader, (2) copy the link and (3) paste that link into your twitter along with the article title... But the best way would be to use the Google Reader's built-in "Shared items" feed.

As you might know, Google Reader offers public access to all your shared items. What is great is that these shared items are also available as an RSS-feed! So all you have to do is to simply "feed" that feed to Twitterfeed and that's it:

Why should I buy from a small software company? Jun 9, 2009

Imagine you've found an error in a product from some huge international software corporation, let's call it "MacroHard". I bet it has already happened to you a couple of times. Imagine you contact "MacroHard" to let them know about the error. Now think of the chances that this error would actually be fixed in a reasonable amount of time. The probability is close to zero, huh? Also think of the chances that MacroHard will contact you personally when it's fixed...

I'm not even mentioning feature-requests (instead of errors). You must have already guessed - forget about 'em.

Along with the company size, and brand recognition, and other "big" stuff you get when you buy from a massive corporation, you should always ask yourself - "how can I affect the product development or at least the error correction in it?"

Here's an example from earlier this week:

>>>

Wednesday (9:30 AM EST) — Customer:

"Hi there. I've downloaded the latest version of RSS Feed Creator, nice tool. But I need a feature that seems to be missing - or I was just too dumb to find it."

Wednesday (9:35 AM EST) — Alex (Jitbit):

"Hi. Thank you for the email. Can you specify what feature you miss exactly?"

Wednesday (10:30 AM EST) — Customer:

"Hi Alex. Thanks for the quick response. I want to remove the old outdated items from the feed, but the tool doesn't allow removing more than one item at a time."

Wednesday (12:45 PM EST) — Alex (Jitbit):

"Hi. Looked into this and it seems to be an easy task, we're adding this to our next version that will be out within 24 hours, please stay updated to our version-history RSS feed".

Thursday (10:30 AM EST) — Customer:

"Hello. We've downloaded the latest version, all OK. I think we'll be ordering some licenses later on today."

Thursday (02:09 PM EST):

"New Order for 2 licenses of Jitbit RSS Feed Creator"

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Let's see a massive international software corporation do that.