The Productivity Paradox

I recently wrote a post introducing Twitter. That post ended with a reference to optimising your Twitter experience by using the excellent Tweetdeck in order to increase your productivity. Chris Spagnuolo wrote a great article on how to achieve this.

Many people run Tweetdeck across multiple machines. At this stage, Tweetdeck does not sync across machines (it appears that a future version will allow for this - see the release notes of the current version for more details). You will agree with me that it is a bit of a hassle to tweak Tweetdeck on each of your machines and in my opinion this is another example of a productivity paradox.

However, over the weekend, I managed to put together a hack that manages to synchronize Tweetdeck across two Macs utilising Dropbox and symlinks. I have not had the opportunity to test this on a PC, but I think it could very easily be done using the technique described below.

The idea for this hack was based on two things. Firstly, a recent article in Lifehacker explained how to Sync Files and Folders Outside Your My Dropbox Folder making use of symlinks. And secondly, 1Password also makes use of Dropbox to synchronize information across multiple machines. I combined these two pieces of information to produce this hack.

What will I need?

1. A Dropbox account
2. An ability to create a symlink, aka a symbolic link

So how do I do it?

In a nutshell my technique creates a master Tweetdeck reference folder, synchronizes this with Dropbox and then fools Tweetdeck in to sharing this master reference folder. So lets look at each step in turn.

Create a master Tweetdeck reference folder.

The first thing you need to do is locate the Tweetdeck Preference folder on the machine that you regard as your main Tweetdeck machine, i.e. this is the one that contains the settings that you want synced. This folder resides in ~/Library/Preferences/. The image below shows you mine.

Then you need to create a symlink of this folder. Follow the instructions on the Lifehacker article on how to do this, or if you are a bit lazier - like me - use Make Symlink. This is a Mac OS X-compatible contextual menu plugin which allow users to create symbolic links. The image below shows Make Symlink in action.

Synchronize the symlink master Tweetdeck reference folder with Dropbox.

Once you created the symlink folder, drag it to your Dropbox folder. See below. Once in this folder, Dropbox does all the clever synchronization in the background.

The last step is to fool Tweetdeck in to sharing the syncronized master reference folder

You do this by going to your other machine, opening your Dropbox folder and locating the syncronized master Tweetdeck reference folder. Then create another symlink of this folder and replace the Tweetdeck reference folder on your second machine with this folder. It is important to make sure that the folders are named the same (i.e. you may have to delete ” symlink” from the name of the symlinked folder.

At this point both versions of Tweetdeck will be similar. And two-way synchronization works.

Shortcomings of this technique

• I have only tested this by running one version of Tweetdeck at a time. I.e. I close Tweetdeck on one machine then open it on my secondary machine. As this is the way I tend to use Tweetdeck, it is not a big deal.
• It appears to need a bit of time to synchronize, i.e. if you open Tweetdeck on the second machine and none of the changes are synchronized, you may have to shut Tweetdeck and open it again in a minute or so (this seems to force Dropbox to synchronize the folders.)
• It synchronizes all settings from machine to machine, so if one machine has a lower res screen than the other and you use different sized Tweetdeck windows across two machines, it will syncronise the smaller one of the two.
• I have only tested this on two Macs, but I am pretty sure that you can synchronize as many as you want as long as you repeat the steps above in the same order.
• I have only tested this for a couple of hours, so this may not be a robust sync hack, but it seems to be OK.

Conclusion

Tweetdeck is a fantastic way to increase your Twitter productivity. However, one major shortcoming of the current version is lack of synchronization. This shortcoming may lead to a classic productivity paradox. This hack appears to solve the problem until @IainDodsworth releases the next version of Tweetdeck.