Two low-tech ways to keep track of all your online discussions

Twitter, Facebook, Blogs…how to keep track of all that information?

I find myself bouncing from one site to the next trying to keep up with comments on my various blogs, Twitter and Facebook. I originally tried iGoogle with Google Reader and Gmail at the top but where I’m at the connection is too slow to make this viable.

Solution 1: Gmail in HTML mode + Bloglines in mobile mode

Gmail can be viewed in HTML mode which is quite fast so I was able to funnel all my information from Twitter and Facebook into that. And then I used the mobile version of Bloglines to keep track of comments on my key online blog projects.

Now with just two clicks of the mouse I can get a quick overview of activity on a dozen online discussions. I timed it at about 30 seconds check both sites.

Solution 2: Pure Email

An even simpler solution would be to feed all the blog feeds for comments into Gmail as well. Then I’d only need one click. Hmmmm, I might just try that. There’s a small difficulty in that I use different email contacts on some of those blogs but that might be easy to remedy.

Note this doesn’t have to be Gmail. But I find Gmail to be the quickest for viewing on a mobile phone and I also try to avoid using my corporate or personal email addresses for these kinds of notifications so Gmail is a good option for a single address to funnel everything into.

One good thing about using email notifications is that they tend to be instantaneous where RSS feeds (especially through Bloglines) can have a lag. If I’m checking now I want to know everything up to this very second.

P.S. Facebook is a pig on a slow connection. The m.facebook.com version is much faster but lacks a lot of functionality. Email notifications is a good way around ever having to visit that place.