Tech Notes From The Trenches

Did you ever search for anything in Twitter? What did you get? Probably a lot of noise. Useful information is hard to find using Twitter search. Hopsy solves this.

Do a Hopsy search and find useful Twitter messages. How? Hopsy ranks the Twitter search results using an influence number. People on Twitter are influential according to the messages and links they tweet. Your followers endorse you (RT) or don’t. The links you share start trending or don’t. That is influence.

Basically, if you have a good reputation, your tweets will show up before than someone with no rep or a bad rep. Makes sense? If yes, please check out Hopsy. If not, I would like to hear your ideas about Twitter tweet rankings and search.

Here is a Hopsy search you can try out: Search for 2009. Here is a Twitter search to compare: Search for 2009.

I love simplicity. I love blogs that write simple and concrete posts. That is why I love:

Seth’s Blog – A great blog about business, marketing and ideas in general.

Signal vs. Noise – A design and usability blog. They also post interesting ideas about business, entrepreneurship and startups.

They are simple, concrete and straight-to-the-point posts. No unnecessary words or sentences.

I wish more of the blogs I like were like that. If you have so much to say, you should do it in many posts. Not a huge post.

I am slowly learning from them. You should read them and learn too.

These instructions are for Mac. Any Mac. If you are on a PC, get a Mac.

1. Download Dropbox

You need an invite from a cool techie friend.

2. Install it

(Yes, drag and drop it to your Applications folder)

3. Fire up a Terminal.app

(You can find this in Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app with the Finder. Double-click on it)

4. Type:

cd ~/Dropbox

You are changing directory to the default Dropbox folder.

5. Type:

ln -s ~/Documents Documents

Basically, I created a symbolic link in my Dropbox folder to my Documents folder, which did the trick. This creates a backup of your Documents folder, by creating a symbolic link in your Dropbox folder.

And you are done! Dropbox will automatically upload your files to a Dropbox/Documents folder.