Using MindManager as a Twitter Reader
Like most MindManager users, I tend to be an early adopter, so it feels odd to have gotten on the twitter bandwagon just a few weeks before Oprah. There is a lot of noise, but I have found useful information I would not have otherwise come across. I use it as another means of alerting folks of new tools posted to the wiki or new entries on the blog. I don’t think it will ever find its way onto my phone, but it offers an interesting view into what folks are doing in the MindManager/GTD area each evening.
One thing I have found difficult is figuring out how what I have already “read” in the stream of twitters coming in. Some folks just post occassional nuggets that get lost in the stream. I’m sure the twitter clients allow you to mark things read, but its not obvious to me how.
So, just in time, Andrew Wilcox this evening twittered a link to an experiment he did with using the News Smart Map Part to import and organize twitters from his friends. This reminded me of the MindManager RSS News Reader posted back in March 2007.
The macro in that tool takes the RSS feed and logs it in a “database” as well as feeding it into an in-tray. That allows you to copy/paste/mark-done/delete the topics and not have them reappear when you refresh the feed. I mainly use the tool to process tasks coming in from Jott and to process blog comments via RSS to make sure I have closed out the action items associated with them.
To try this out, I first went to twitter.com to get therss feed for my account, which is .
I next used this to “Add new news feed to library” in the map part tab in MindManager. In order to do this using MindManager 8, I found I had to first manually add a “News Feeds” folder to the tab, otherwise the add-news-feed command didn’t do anything.
Once the news map part is created, you drag it into the MindManager map:
Once you have create a map with the feeds you want processed, you next run the rss_to_intray.mmbas macro to processed the current feed content into a “rssdb” topic and an in-tray.
The macro is available in the MindManager macro library or you can automatically install it using along with other AO tools using the Setup program. If you use the setup program, the macro will be located in the My Maps\AO directory and can be run manually or with the rssi GyroQ tag.
Once you have the entries into MindManager, you can process them manually or using a tool like ResultsManager to feed them up to a dashboard (perhaps with a someday/maybe or list filter).
Entries 
The Mindjet Blog » Twitter Update said,
May 5, 2009 @ 12:41 pm
[…] And, here’s a new post from a MindManager enthusiast, ‘ActivityOwner’, who started to use MindManager 8 as a dashboard for his Twitter account. Check it out! […]
The Art of Using Twitter - via @Mindjet Blogsvia @Mindjet Blogs said,
October 20, 2016 @ 7:52 pm
[…] And, here’s a new post from a MindManager enthusiast, ‘ActivityOwner’, who started to use MindManager 8 as a dashboard for his Twitter account. Check it out! […]
The Art of Using Twitter - said,
November 25, 2020 @ 4:58 pm
[…] And, here’s a new post from a MindManager enthusiast, ‘ActivityOwner’, who started to use MindManager 8 as a dashboard for his Twitter account. Check it out! […]