SocialToo

I was introduced to SocialToo by a direct message from a new person I followed today.

We have a couple of projects running at the moment using Twitter for support or for creating networks (smallworlds and PLEs) and having struggled with ways to keep track of new people signing up to the service at the beginning of each project and automated way to do this would be great.

SocialToo allows you automatically send a DM with a message (written by you) to anyone who follows you and can be set to automatically follow them back. This was the first time I had had a DM from someone I had followed and it made me feel all warm and happy and wanted, especially as David followed it up with a DM of his own asking me something simple about my work based on my twitter profile statement. Very smart, great way to build a network.

I could see this working with our students, if they have just signed up to twitter and accepted the default settings, a DM would generate an email to them, pulling them back to twitter and it would be a personal contact.

You can only associate one twitter account with each socialtoo account, so haivng created multiple twitter identities for our different audiences, we would need matching social too accounts. Having said that, it is a one shot deal, set up the account and leave it to work automatically.

You can also set the account to automatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you, though I am not sure we would want this with students on our undergraduate course. SocialToo also has a survey tool which can be used to post surveys to twitter, could be useful for getting quick and dirty feedback on topics, issues etc.

RSS and journals

When setting up our smallworlds project and the course content for key skills undergraduate course, we struggled to find good sources of customisable RSS searches in peer reviewed journals. In the course of searching for something else, I stumbled across a solution today, the JISC project ticTOC.

ticTOC

ticTOC allows you to search for journals by journal name or publisher, then add them to a list ‘myTOC’.

The table of contents for these journals can then be exported as a OPML file for an RSS reader. Very simple and easy to do.

TOCs RSS in Google Reader

I would like to be able to take this one stage further and add search terms but, it is a step in the right direction.

Of course, I put it on twitter and then got another suggestion for something similar (thanks twitterverse!), myjournals. Tools like these are the workhorses that we need to encourage more scientists into the web2.0 world. Current awareness is the bread and butter of science, if we can make it obvious that RSS can turn your bread and butter into a cheese toasty we are laughing!

update: general Search added December 2008.