Getting Things Done to GTD (Jabber with Google Apps)

This is a complicated process I followed to try to make things easier. It started with an article discussing how to Make Gmail Your Gateway to the Web. Basically, he is trying to make his GMail account his gateway to everything. I've got my Google Apps account all setup to received email from every account with filters and tags and alternate accounts. The calendars are shared with the rest of the family (if I could only get everyone else to use them).

The only thing he's done that I haven't is what he calls "update and track your social networks via IM". So, I setup the ping.fm and notify.me accounts as he describes, and tried it out. It all worked pretty well except I coulnd't get the notify.me account to validate GTalk.

A little Google research and I found that I have to add 10 SRV entries in my DNS for the domain to property route the jabber messages to Google. This Google article explains it pretty well. Next, I had to figure out how to enter this info into a Dreamhost account. I found that the correct method is to enter "_xmpp-server._tcp" in the name field and "5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com." in the value field (be sure to include the period at the end). After a little time for the DNS to get settled, I tried the validate process again, and it worked great.

OK, so after all of that, let's try it out.

Ping.fm works exactly as advertised. I setup micro-blog messages to go to Twitter, and status updates to both Twitter and Facebook. It all works via the chat client in GMail.

Notify.me also did what I expected. I couldn't find a way to get my entire Twitter stream to come through, but the messages sent to me came through fine. (Still working on direct messages)

However, there is a problem. In the IM that comes in from notify.me, I can't tell who sent the message. There isn't any setup of the format that I can see, but it wasn't there. I posted a suggestion message to the service.

We'll see how long I keep this setup going.