New Macworld article: Working with MobileMe and iLife, an excerpt from Take Control of MobileMe (December 18, 2008)

New TidBITS article: Backblaze Launches Mac Beta of Online Backup Service (2008-12-09)

New Macworld article: Keep on Track with Digital Reminders (December 10, 2008)

New TidBITS article: CrashPlan and Mozy Modify Pro Options (2008-12-09)

So I was trying out Twitter Tools, which can do interesting things like creating a tweet when you post on your blog, and creating a blog post when you post a tweet. Both of which are potentially useful things. From the FAQ in the Read Me file:

What happens if I have both my tweets posting to my blog as posts and my posts sent to Twitter? Will it cause the world to end in a spinning fireball of death?

Actually, Twitter Tools has taken this into account and you can safely enable both creating posts from your tweets and tweets from your posts without duplicating them in either place.

Yeah, except it didn’t. As soon as I turned it on and set up the various options I wanted, two things happened. First, it downloaded my last 20 tweets and made blog entries out of them. (Not at all what I wanted, because some of them are quite old…I was assuming it would start with my next tweet.) And then, having discovered 20 new blog entries, it created 20 new tweets, one for each. (That’s what the Read Me explicitly said wouldn’t happen.) So they were totally duplicated—highly annoying. Nor did this stop after the initial batch—my next tweet, to apologize, was also turned into a blog post that was immediately re-tweeted.

I also discovered another missing feature: when Twitter Tools creates a blog post from a tweet, it just truncates the tweet arbitrarily and turns that into the title, but with no verbiage like “From Twitter…” (comparable to the “New Blog Post” it puts in tweets). So, another big minus.

So: Twitter Tools = FAIL. And sorry for all the birdy poo. Now to uninstall…