yedmart.com

A bright eyed, bushy tailed Yedmart was not unlike any other Twitter n00b when he first signed up back in August 2008. To this day, not much has changed. He is still trying to pinpoint a suitable use for the amazing tool/service.

After touting around the landscape of different clients and Twitter services, the preferred weapons of choice these days (or for the moment until something better comes along) are Tweetie and Hootsuite. If you have not used Tweetie on the Mac, please do. The UI is non-comparable to any other client out there. It is light, quick and just makes so much sense. The only gripe is the lack of lists/groups, but the ease of use makes up for this. There is a free version that is ad supported, but with ads run by Fusion, there is always something beautiful to look at.

Next, enter Hootsuite. Hootsuite basically has everything you need - support for lists, scheduled tweets, stats, multiple accounts, Facebook integration, keyword search/tracking etc etc all snapily accessible from a web browser. This allows you to get downright dirty with Twitter. Strategize, tweet, search/stalk and get bogged down in stats with all these fab tools at your disposal.

The picture below comes courtesy of Wordle.

Banging your head against a brick wall can often seem like more fun than successfully configuring your Gmail IMAP account, Apple Mail and iPhone to talk nicely to each other. There's countless instructions and opinions all over the internet for setting this up, but here are some of Yedmart's expert tips:

1. Don't sync your mail accounts directly between your Apple Mail and iPhone (with iTunes or whatever). Instead, set up a new IMAP account on your iPhone. Don't use the default Gmail thing - that's POP. Use your Gmail account as the trunk of your email tree, and Apple Mail and iPhone as the branches.
2. Use the IMAP path prefix [Google Mail] in Apple Mail to clean up your folder names in your sidebar. Also assign this on your iPhone for consistency.
3. Assign your Gmail IMAP "folders" to the system's Junk, Drafts, Trash folders etc in Mail.app and iPhone. The instructions for this can be found after a quick Google search.
4. Activate advanced IMAP settings in Gmail (in Settings > Labs) then go to Settings > Labels and uncheck the labels you wish to hide in Apple Mail and iPhone IMAP.
5. When creating labels in Gmail, make these labels [Google Mail]/labelname so they coincide with the IMAP path prefix you have already set up.
6. If you operate multiple accounts in Gmail and want to be selective about which account you send from, Gmail is easy - no instructions required here. On the other hand, Apple Mail requires you to go to the settings and change your "from" address before sending. If using the Gmail SMTP server to send your mail, you will not need to change the password etc, because all "from addresses" will be using your Gmail password. The iPhone is similar, but even more unbearably fiddly. If somebody has worked out a better, less clunky solution for this, please speak now.