Joshua Guffey

Posts Tagged ‘how to’

We’re all very well connected these days. That’s good! But without some specialized filters the real-time web and social media can certainly start to take over our lives.

I recently posted a screencast about how Syphir can make Gmail more manageable and powerful.  Now I want to show you how you can use Syphir to delay your Facebook comments from showing up in your Gmail inbox until you’re ready for them.

Take a look at the screenshot below to see what the filters rules and actions are. Then head over to Syphir and create your own filters to manage web-overload.

Building on Gmail’s recent app platform, Syphir allows you to create filters that just aren’t available in standard Gmail; such as an ability to delay emails until a later time.  It’s not perfect but it’s worth a serious look.

I’m just playing with a basic filter right now that delays all incoming email from 11pm to 7am.  It’s an attempt at empowering myself to sleep more and geek less.  (Or at least to geek during daytime hours.)

You can also combine filter rules to have email containing certain words or from certain senders to be delayed until a later time.  For example you could have all Facebook email delayed until 2pm and then respond to all of it at that time. (Remind me to do that!)

Watch the screencast below to get a sense for how powerful Syphir is already, and then consider that they’ve only just begun.

View this screencast on iPhone here: iPhone version

For updates about more ways to filter the incoming data stream that is today’s web, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

If you attempted to use Google Wave when it came out last year, it’s likely that you met with the same fate as I did.  Honestly, I tried it for a bit, found (at least at first) that NO ONE was on the service, and discovered that, worst of all, there were no notifications of any kind when ‘waves’ were updated.  (They also don’t have a practical version for iPhone yet, but I won’t go into that.)  So I dropped it.

Well yesterday Google announced that they have created the option for email alerts when waves are updated.  It’s a bit tricky to find the option to turn it on.  You’ve got to push the arrow to the right of your Wave inbox tab to view the option.

Google hasn’t gotten it perfect yet, as you can see from their psuedo-disclaimer below.  Still, this is a huge leap forward with a feature that, in retrospect, should have been shipped out-of-box for a service that has positioned itself as a tremendous advance in online collaboration.

How do you use Google Wave?