Photo by jazzmasterson

If we’re anything alike, you also use a wild tangle of web applications to manage your life or job. We all love web applications — they’re often inexpensive (if not free) and they allow us access our data from almost anywhere. If you have a modern cellphone then you’ve probably also felt the special magic of being able to access all your personal miscellanea from a tiny device that’s always with you.

The best part about having an endless sea of web applications is the ability to find something that fits your one specific need really well. You don’t need a monster application that tries to do everything and ends up doing nothing exceptionally well. However, without a single point of focus you become inundated in bookmarks to all your tools.

Luckily, a new breed of applications is being born from this ingenious epiphany: when you’re at your PC, your instant messenger (IM) is like your cellphone. It’s always with you. Suddenly, you can chat with your various web applications as if they were simply people on your buddy list. You no longer have to visit each site and log in. Your credentials become your instant messaging account.

One project that really understands this mentality is Twitter. If you’re not familiar with it, Twitter allows you to post quick updates about what you’re doing from a social website — but it really makes sense when you send updates from your IM or cellphone. These updates can be forwarded to your friends automatically in a way that’s almost telepathic.

Among many other things, two really interesting things have evolved from the simple idea that spawned Twitter:

First, ordinary people started following celebrities and quasi-celebrities in addition to their friends. While one’s first impulse is often how this is just an extension of reality shows, or a marketing scheme by these public figures, it’s actually something much more interesting in practice. You find yourself feeling like you’re intercepting the thought processes of people you admire. A lot of people already use Twitter: Authors of your favorite books, representative political figures, developers of your favorite applications, major news organizations, creators of your favorite television shows and so on. There’s obviously another long list of benefits for each celebrity.

Secondly, developers started to realize that their popular applications could also interact directly with their fans. Twitter already provides a communications platform that has a ton of existing users. This avoids the pitfall we come across in development where we’re asking users to adopt yet another discontinuous tool or process. Most people don’t want another tool. Anybody with an instant messenger account can communicate with Twitter and, by extension, communicate with some of their favorite applications.

I’ve found myself switching my digital life over to applications that understand this new “mashup” mindset. My current favorite example is “Remember the Milk”.

Remember the Milk (RTM) is a simple online task list. It has a clean interface and uses Ajax tastefully for its user interaction. Otherwise you’ve seen this kind of thing before: tasks, due dates, lists, yada, yada. What’s really special about RTM is the ability to remote control it through IM. Not only can you update and receive notifications about your own tasks, but you can also quickly send tasks to friends and co-workers who have an account with RTM and Twitter.

For my part, my usual suspects are my friends and co-workers at my software company. We often pass tasks back and forth through IM, e-mail and post-its. After several years, we’ve come to the conclusion that none of those options are very dependable. We’ve tried all kinds of task management software, but our busy workplace has the habit of refining out superfluous tools or steps. People simply stop using them. The one constant fixture in our business chatter is our instant messenger (namely, Google Talk).

Blending the useful combination of Twitter and Remember the Milk into our commonplace IM communication seems like the way to make this shared task tracking finally stick. Instead of telling each person something the moment it pops into my head, regardless of what either of us is doing, I can simply IM it off to RTM to be added to their task list. They then receive reminders by IM of their current tasks from the RTM contact. Nothing gets buried in the chat log or inbox. They don’t need to log into RTM daily to be reminded of tasks we’ve given each other.

My hope in writing this article is giving you something to forward to your usual suspects, who will then rush onward to make your mutual existences more painless and dependable.

If anyone has other mashups like this I’d love to hear about them.

Here’s the 5 minute rundown:

Sign up with Twitter

Visit https://twitter.com/signup

Feel free to follow my updates for future tips: http://twitter.com/jstanden

Integrate Twitter with IM

In Twitter: Settings->Phone & IM

Register your IM account and verify it as instructed.

Sign up with Remember the Milk

Visit http://www.rememberthemilk.com/signup/

Add your IM account to: Settings->Reminders->”I want to be reminded by”

Integrate R.T.M. with Twitter

Follow ‘rtm’ on Twitter: http://twitter.com/rtm

Visit: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/twitter/

Enter your Twitter username and follow the simple verification step. This page also contains a very neat list of commands for remote controlling your RTM account through through your IM account.

Done!

That’s it! If you have any questions or run into any trouble, I’d be happy to help in the comments.

Update: Lifehack has an excellent summary of using Twitter productively with a great list of examples.

Update #2: I found another great list of Twitter mashups on Digg from Jake Bouma, and this Big Juicy Guide to Twitter from Caroline Middlebrook.