Update: The link to News.me is inactive; and Undrip has been discontinued.
Last week, I asked you, the good people of this listserv, what you wanted help with in 2013. And you delivered with some big requests.
So starting today, I’m going to offer some answers.
And a heads up: If you didn’t send in your request for help, there’s still time! Just hit reply and let me know what you want help with in 2013.
First up: A social media request from Caitlin in DC:
Caitlin, it should be noted, doesn’t follow a crazy number of people — just 500 or so. But reporters and storytellers tweet a lot. And so yeah, even a few hundred people tweeting can overwhelm your screen.
I’d recommend checking out two tools. The first is News.me. You choose what you want to give it access to — Facebook or Twitter — and then it sorts through all of the links your friends are sharing. It sees what stories your friends are sharing most, and it sends you an email every morning with the previous day’s top shares.
It’s not perfect — for instance, there’s no way to tell News.me what stories/people you’d like to see more of in your daily email. But it’s a nice starting point, and if you’re off Twitter for a day or two, it does a good job of telling you what you missed.
Click here to test out News.me — it’s free!
The other tool is called Undrip. It’s an app for iOS. Like News.me, it connects with Facebook and Twitter. In an Instagram-like stream, it shows you the stories that your friends are sharing. You can click to see the conversation that your friends are having about a link. You can read a story within the app, or you can automatically save it from the app to one of your read-later services (like Pocket).
It also lets you sort through more than just links. Photos, video, entire sites — Undrip shows you everything your friends are sharing via Twitter and Facebook.
The only downside to Undrip is that it’s only on the iPhone — no iPad or Android integration yet.
Click here to download Undrip — it’s also free!
And as for that priority inbox, here’s a bit of good news: Twitter just acquired the team behind Summify, another service to help you make sense of your Twitter feed. Maybe that priority inbox will hit your Twitter stream in 2013?
Now get out there and tell some great stories today!