ProxiFeed – One More Acorn For My Collection

kidologist.com

IMPORTANT: 8/15-09 – This is a great program BUT there is no way of looking at your tweets before they go out. As you will read below, ProxiFeed looks for key words and phrases and then sends out Tweets with links as if you did that yourself. I was just alerted to a Tweet that was recently sent out and the link took the reader to an entirely inappropriate site. I have been forced to disconnect it pending further review.

I’ll be the first to admit it, I’m one sick puppy (smile). I love to collect widgets and gadgets as much as this squirrel loves to collect his acorns. Difference between him and me is, he only does it before winter and I do it year round.

I have this folder on my desktop entitled “Social Media Tools in Use”. At last count I was up to 35 total. And, believe it or not, I use most of them regularly. I’m always scanning for the next great addition. I have more Twitter tools than you can shake an acorn at and, I keep finding more. I am about this close to breaking down and getting a Blackberry. That’s probably going to mean an entirely new folder all to itself. It’s definitely gonna’ get worse before it gets better.

I do have standards. Such as they are (smile). In order for any new toy to attract my attention it needs to show some promise of making my job easier. Twitter can be exceptionally time consuming and, frankly, I’m just not that interesting. I use TwitterFeed to automatically Tweet my blog entries, TweetLater to pre-schedule motivational and funny quotes, and HootSuite to snag content and Tweet it now or schedule it for later. Right now I monitor Tweets using TweetDeck but also go back and forth to both Seesmic desktop and web versions. I have searches set on each client. Using TweetDeck, sometimes I post to Twitter only, sometimes to FaceBook, and sometimes to both simultaneously. I refuse to use Auto-DM to people who follow me and I ignore all Tweets that promise me 100′s of new followers each hour. I know that those tools are out there but they hold zero interest for me.

I like to watch TweetDeck fairly closely. I not only look for Tweets that interest me, I also look at how those Tweets were sent. And, I evaluate who is using what to send what. I.E., is this person a “power tweeter” or a hack like me (smile). Obviously the former gets more attention than the latter. I have yet to evaluate TweetSpinner. Ping.Fm, or FriendFeed closely. I’m on FriendFeed and I’m not even sure how that happened. All three of these apps look pretty cool but, they also look fairly complicated. Complex I am not. I like things simple, clean, and fast.

So, today I am scanning TweetDeck and one of my favorite Tweeters is sending out using something called ProxiFeed. Hmmm. I wonder what dat is (smile)? Turns out, ProxiFeed allows you to set up custom Twitter feeds based on key words or phrases of your choosing. Areas that are of interest to you. For example, I am interested in all forms of networking and all forms of business applications for social media. So, I entered in a bunch of phrases and now ProxiFeed will search content and automatically tweet links using bit.ly on a schedule of my choosing. As often as each hour. Cooooool. It’s doing it now (smile). Setup took all of about 60 seconds. ProxiFeed also provides stats and the ablity to specify RSS feeds that you would like to have mixed in and does handle multiple accounts and you can create multiple custom feeds. There is also an option to also have it Tweet out links to ads and, apparently, you get paid somehow for allowing it to do that.  As I said before, I do have standards and even my standards are not that low. Yet (smile).

Thanks for visiting!

Craig

UPDATE (7/26/09): This is a very cool product but you will want to monitor it until you have it dialed in. When I originally set up the keywords and phrases that I wanted ProxiFeed to search on, in my mind, I was thinking it was looking at article “titles”. That ass/u/mption would appear to be incorrect. It is searching “content” for those keywords and phrases. It would be nice if it would allow you to review tweets before they are sent out but, I guess that would defeat a lot of the purpose. My best advice is to keep and eye on your tweets and adjust your feed parameters as needed. I have also occasionally had it post content that was over a year old. It is supposed to look for the latest, freshest, content. I notified ProxiFeed on this (and, on a Sunday) and they did respond very quickly and they are researching that glitch. I am very impressed by their demonstrated desire to continue to improve this app!

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