How often have you wasted time searching through page after page of e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds, and YouTube videos on your computer, trying to find an important item?

Although I am pretty organized, sometimes even my organization skills need a little help. A company in San Francisco, Radar Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, which may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving documents. How?

Twine can scan almost any electronic document for the names of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its algorithms recognize. Then it does something remarkable: it automatically tags or marks all of these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer from their context.

They can make their collections, or “twines,” private, share them in groups with other members having common interests like politics or Technology, or even make the twines public. For instance, people planning a trip to Japan (something I would like to do) could send all the Google maps, articles, and travel guide Web pages they are collecting to Twine. As each document is added, Twine automatically tags items and adds them to the database for the trip, compiling an index with references.

Twine’s organizational abilities have enthused excitement among some early users, and quite a few people are on the waiting list to try it out, I am sure. Unfortunately, it is still in private beta, but they are gradually opening up invitations accordingly. The site will be free to regular users, although there may be premium content as well, to keep finances high. Additional features and services will most likely be for a cost and supported through advertisements in the meantime.

Although Twine is focusing on teams and professionals, Twin does not deny individuals the ability to have a little fun too. With the help of Taskbin combined with Twine, I think you may have the ultimate organization tools regardless whether or not you are a professional or part of a team.

I did a review of Remember the milk a few months ago and at the time I raved about how awesome I thought it was. Now it looks like RTM has decided to improve itself. How you are asking? Well they now allow you to link RTM directly to your GMail account. This means that you can pretty much do anything you would want on RTM directly from Gmail. You can assign tasks, remove tasks, send reminders, well pretty much do it all from gmail. It does take a download which you can get here, and you can only use the firefox web browser with it at the moment.

I am personally very excited about this latest update for Remember the Milk and think that it takes two great functions and combines them into one. In fact one of the only complaints I have had about most of the task management applications available is that while you could be emailed reminders you couldn’t set reminders, or do other things from email, but now you can with this update.

Some of the more useful things you can to with this plug in

Manage your tasks:

When you install the plugin there will be a task management pane on the right of your gmail. From here you can manage your tasks just as if you were logged into RTM, but from gmail. This is a great feature, now I don’t have to have multiple URL’s opened when I am dealing with scheduling.

Connect Tasks with specific emails:

Now when you get an email that has something you want to remember to do, or that you want to reply to at a certain time or after you have completed a task. Simply add the email as a task and it will remind you too take the action you when you mean too. I really like this, now I don’t have to worry about forgetting that I needed to email so and so and such and such a time.

You can read more about this fantastic plugin here.

Gmail is hands-down the best web-based email service on the net. Gmail has completely revolutionized the way I look at my inbox. I manage all of my email from my personal Gmail inbox, including the many TTB emails I receive almost daily. At this point, I cannot imagine a program I could use to manage my email any more efficiently.

Perhaps you are the Gmail master and maybe you can share a little more than what I can, but I have put together some tips and tricks to help you love Gmail even better…and get the ladies—–>

I am going to start off with two Firefox plug-ins that I find a great help:

• 1. GmailThis is an excellent browser bookmarker that lets you quickly forward highlighted text on any webpage via Gmail. Very simple!
• 2. Gmail Search – search your Gmail account directly from the Firefox search bar. This can be of great help for people who search for messages, like myself.

Some of these, I am going to recommend GreaseMonkey that allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript:

• Google Reader Integration is a complete integration of GReader into Gmail.
• Label Colors changes color menu labels to make them stand out better. Absolutely love it!
• I cannot tell you how many times I have actually “attached” something, but didn’t actually attach it. Attachment reminder helps reminds you to attach a file to your Gmail, based on whether you have the word attach (‘ed’, ‘ment’, PFA, etc) in the body.
• GmailTo is a code that forces all “mailto” links to open in GMail. This is great if Gmail is the only solution you are using. It is not recommended if you use an email client on your machine to send mails.

I am also going to let you in on some things you might now know. It took me a while to find out about these features, but I have a small excuse. I was using a client for a good while, until I got tired of using an email client that did not give me what I needed. Take a look at these:

• If you are sending a Word document or Excel file as an attachment, Gmail lets you easily open it in Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
• If you use iGoogle, try Gmail gadget. I use iGoogle to bring together a lot of the information I care about on the web. I’ve added the Gmail gadget to my page to get a preview of my Inbox, which never seems to be empty.
• Most people know that you can chat with your contacts in Gmail if they’re using Gmail too. But there are some features that make chat particularly useful in the context of using your email, like replying by chat. You know that dot beside the sender’s name? If they are online and they have sent you an email, you can reply by chatting with the person. The neat thing is that Gamil actually archives the conversation as an email so you can look it up later.

There are so many more tips and tricks and I hope I have given you some that you didn’t already know about. In other words, I hope this was helpful to you. Feel free to educate us on others that were not mentioned above. We are always willing to learn more here at TTB!

Microsoft Outlook 2007 is a powerful e-mail program that allows you to manage your time and information efficiently and thus increases the productivity. It operates as a personal information manager and is comprised of the following three components:

• Mail – This component allows you to send, receive and organize your e-mails.
• Contacts- This component allows you to store the phone, address and other personal details of your contacts.
• Calendar- This component allows you to schedule meetings and keep track of your appointments.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 has the following features:

• Task Management
• To-Do Bar
• Color Categories
• Views
• Search folder
• Internet Calendar
• Gmail Integration

Task Management

Microsoft Outlook helps you to create and manage your tasks. Using tasks you can prioritize your work and also track your progress. Outlook helps you in creating recurring tasks that occur at regular intervals. You can also assign tasks to other Outlook users, set options to monitor the status of the delegated task and send you a status report on completion of the task. Outlook also gives the recipients of the task, options to accept or reject the delegated task.
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If you are wondering what a gravatar is, let me explain. A gravatar is a 80×80 pixel image that you can use to visually represent yourself on the web. Use the same email address to create an account, upload a pic and once it’s approved, it’ll automatically show up. You can use the same avatar image on any Gravatar-enabled website or blog. Just use the same email address and it will automatically show up. Gravatar uses MPAA-style ratings so that they can ensure only appropriate images show up on our site.Gravatar allows you to upload a picture from your computer (the file I used was 2.0 MB) and crop it from there. Gravatar has a cropping tool that allows you to easily do this. One thing I did notice is that the cropping tool gives you much more control when the picture is at a higher resolution. Once your gravatar is cropped and ready, you get to rate it: G, PG, R, X, XX, XXX, XXXX, etc… There is a potential for abuse here, but it is probably a good thing that they decided to allow users to rate their own gravatars.

Gravatar is a pretty simple service and makes it easy to show your own picture on the web. They give you so many options to choose from, but if you decide you want to add a gravatar, then you’ll have to cough up $10 a year. I foresee a significant problem with gravatar as far as abuse goes, however. I don’t see Gravatar surviving very long unless the service secures some serious funding, and right now ten dollars is a little much to pay for gravatars. I sure wouldn’t pay any more. Only time will tell…