Blogging Tips

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the Yoono Firefox addon but it has been around for awhile now. It’s one of those addons I’ve struggled back and forth with. In my opinion it went from great, to bad, to worse, to better. After a quick stop at Black Web 2.0 last night I found out that they’ve now introduced a desktop application as well.

Yoono is best comparable to Digsby or Trillian; it brings together all your IMs and many social networks into one application. Currently, Yoono supports: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Imeem, AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. There is no registration required but, if you want to use Yoono on different computers than it would be best to register.

Once you’re done adding all of your sites, get ready for lots of pop-up notifications (if you enable them)! If you get distracted easily, you may need to disable them. The pop-ups are impressive, you can even see images on them but you can’t reply to items on them. When you click on the person’s name in the pop-up, you’ll be directed to their profile page which opens up in Yoono’s own browser. You can, of course, reply using the actual application.

In the application you can view all updates together under “all” or view each account separately. You can choose (via options) how many items to show at a time.

Speaking of options, setting them will definitely take a few minutes since there’s so many things you can change. First you have your general options that apply to everything, and then you have separate options for each site that you’ve added. So as you can see, it’s not a quick task.

After using the application for a few minutes, I’m actually really impressed. The Facebook timeline is really advanced and is almost like being on the actual site. You can even hide updates from certain users and even hide certain applications (like quizzes) just like on the site. You can also of course, update your status for each site. What’s nice about this is that from the “all” tab you have selective status updating. So, you can choose to update all your sites at once or just a few.

I also love the options available for Twitter. Under “more” you can send the user a DM, view the tweet in a browser, unfollow them, hide their updates altogether from the timeline or translate their tweet via Google — this is great if you’re following someone who tweets in another language that you don’t understand. I also love that it has inline replying for Twitter; this way you don’t lose your place in the timeline. The only downside I see is that it doesn’t support multiple Twitter accounts. For you Twitter search lovers, yes Twitter search is also integrated.

I like the fact that Yoono uses their own browser with the application. For me this is a convenience; I can use Yoono without having to open my own browser. If you don’t like this option though, there is a setting where you can choose to use your own browser with Yoono. There is also an integrated share option within their browswer, which makes it super easy to share any page that you’re viewing.

So, I can honestly say that my opinion has definitely changed about Yoono (I really like it) and, I will definitely be using it on a regular basis (for now). What do you think of Yoono?