We love Twitter. Besides sharing updates regarding our company, product, brand, it also gives us the ability to reach out to people that are actively looking for project management tools. So, we went to Twitter Search, searched for ‘project management tools’, grabbed the resulting RSS feed and set it up in Google Reader. We noticed that at the end of the day there would be a few hundred tweets mentioning “project management tools” and most of them were duplicates, spammy and through ad networks - stuff that people paid other people to tweet. It wasn’t fun to sift through all of this each day.

Is there a way to simplify this?

Enter Twitter advanced search.

Through the advanced search we were able to refine our search terms and exclude certain words that were increasing the number of tweets in the RSS results. Here is the new query that we added to the RSS reader. The corresponding results would have the words “project management tool” but should not have the words “ad”, “#spon” and “#paid”.

project management tool  -ad -#spon -#paid

Beautiful! Today, our results are much more refined and easy to parse through. It’s even fun going through this list and getting in touch with people who might love our app.

Moleskine musings are notes that tend to get into my small Moleskine diary

Life is short. You really don’t know what is going to happen next so it is most logical to make the most of today. Be content and happy. No time for regrets. Keep it simple, get on with it and get it done.

Hats-off to all those company that have accomplished growing their businesses in the pre-web era. Today, it almost seems impossible a run a startup without the use of web apps - to help you check your mail, answer support requests, send out newsletter and accomplish several other functions. What we find interesting in using web apps is that they are inexpensive, easy to setup and automate a lot of processes that were othervise done manually. Automation allows us to free up valuable time that we can pour into working ‘on’ our business rather than ‘in’ it.

Here are some of the tools we use at our workplace. We wanted to say a big THANK YOU for helping us grow our business…

Google Apps - email and document sharing

DeskAway (obviously!) - project collaboration, planning and messaging

Zendesk - support

GetSatisfaction - online community

iContact - email marketing

Google Analytics - tracking visitors on our site

Crazy Egg - heatmaps for pages on our site

Pingdom - monitoring uptime on our servers

Wordpress - blog platform

Twitter - customer support and outreach

Screenr - quick 1-minute help videos online

Dropbox - sharing files across home, office

Skype - communications and demos

A quick video showing how you can accept and reject an issue in a Project in your DeskAway account…

A quick video showing how you can send a message to everyone in a Project in your DeskAway account…