RSS feed for dougbelshaw.com/blog

Posts Tagged ‘data’

Greplin: potential solver of a huge problem?

Welcome back!
Feel free to suggest topics for me to write about using the Suggestions? tab to the right or use Formspring to ask me random stuff. Check Doug's FAQ first!

I’m not Stephen Fry. Nor Ashton Kutcher.

What I mean is that I don’t have enough followers on Twitter for each of them to realise that I can’t keep up with them all. At the time of writing this post, I’ve 3,615 Twitter followers – 3,465 more than Dunbar’s number. In other words, people expect me to be able to remember my conversations with them when I can’t even remember who they are.

This is potentially embarrassing within the increasingly business-focused world I’m operating. I need a quick way to find out if I’ve spoken/tweeted/emailed/shared a doc with someone very quickly.

Enter Greplin. When I read about it on TechCrunch yesterday, it was a bit of a eureka moment:

It’s a personal search engine for all that data you keep locked away in the cloud. If you’ve used desktop search like spotlight, you’ll get Greplin right away. It’s like spotlight for your cloud data.

After you use it for the first time you’ll understand that you’ll never not use it again. And there are nice touches like showing real time results as you type. And Greplin only uses OAuth and other APIs for authorization, so they never see your third party site credentials.

I’ve signed up and added the services (GMail, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Google Calendar, Google Docs) that I want Greplin to index. If it’s as good as it look in the video below, I may just drop the $45/year required to ‘go Pro’ and unlock indexing of Evernote and email attachments…

In terms of user outcomes, this is awesome. It provides ‘just-in-time’ data to allow you to make decisions, have meaningful conversations, and (perhaps most importantly) prevent social awkwardness. :-D

Posted: September 2nd, 2010
Categories: Productivity, Technology
Tags: , , , , , ,
Comments: View Comments.

Things I Learned This Week – #35

Offline this week I learned how dead the world of Higher education is over the summer, that there was a reason I was heavily discouraged to take GCSE Art, and that trying to run after a takeaway curry the night before is a non-starter… :-p
(more…)

Things I Learned This Week – #34

This week I learned that seagulls are carnivorous (I saw one eating a pigeon), that trying to escape via a nettle-strewn path when playing ‘capture the flag’ is foolish, and that this season is going to be pretty much the same as the last for Sunderland…
(more…)

Things I Learned This Week – #33

Offline this week I learned not to go and see films on the basis of who’s in them, not to sit next to large cheese plants at doctors surgeries, and that listening to audiobooks before bed almost guarantees some form of lucid dreaming. :-p
(more…)

Things I Learned This Week – #32

Offline this week I learned that games-based learning is the future for my son, Ben (he loves Big Brain Academy on the Wii!), that nothing beats a whiteboard and coloured pens for mindmaps, and that there are, apparently, spouse-imposed laws about what you can and can’t do in en-suites between certain hours of the day… :-p (more…)

Things I Learned This Week – #31

You’re expecting me, I know, to talk about Google Teacher Academy UK. I learned so much in my time in London that to try and shoehorn it into this post would be foolish. Instead, I’m going to write a series of five (or so) blog posts over the next couple of weeks. I’ll stick to the usual format with this post! :-) (more…)

Things I Learned This Week – #30

Offline this week I learned that 3 year-old boys’ nostrils can accommodate quite large chickpeas, what amniocentisis means, and that objects in your wing mirrors may appear more distant that they actually are… :-p (more…)

Things I Learned This Week – #29

Offline this week I learned that our two man tent is very waterproof (thankfully!) that the PS3 game Heavy Rain is all kinds of awesome, and that after three months I’m still just as likely to get on the wrong Metro…
(more…)

Things I Learned This Week – #28

Offline this week I learned that running two 10k’s in a week doesn’t actually kill you, that ‘location-based task chunking’ aids productivity and that the Kindle rocks (although technically the latter can go online as well…) :-p
(more…)

Things I Learned This Week – #27

Offline this week I learned that sometimes you’ve got to just grab the bull by the horns and take the lead, that lemon curd has never stopped being insanely tasty, and that camping with a 3 year-old is actually quite fun!
(more…)

Work with me
uncopyrighted
Bluehost FTW!