Tweeting from My Kindle: Inside the Kindle 2.5 upgrade

Up here in the mountains, I’ve pretty much been off the grid, except now, my Amazon Kindle, near and dear to my heart is ON the grid. I got the coveted 2.5 upgrade two days a go and since then have linked it to my Twitter account. This means that I can highlight pieces of a book and then tweet it out.  While it is not linked to my Amazon affiliate program (the only program I use for any revenue to cover the costs of this blog) it is really a cool tool.

The biggest enhancements in this upgrade are:

1. Collections – My books are now organized by collection which rotate by what I’ve read most recently. It is great because the books within the collection also are listed in order by what has been read most recently. Also, books can be put in multiple collections.  This is great for separating things out as I have everything from my reading material to those hefty PowerSchool manuals on my kindle. It just makes reading much easier.

   Wish #1: I wish I could put books in a collection that are in my archive so that archived items would show up under each collection. Typically I archive mostly my fiction that I’ve read before.

   Wish #2: When you delete an app on the iTouch, it asks you to rate the app. I wish that rating books and writing reviews were more easily found within the kindle. It may be in there, but I cannot find it.
   
   

2. Social Media Integration – You can link up your Facebook and Twitter accounts and tweet or facebook by pressing a certain key combination. The cool thing is that my comments in the tweet or facebook come up as a footnote number and by clicking that it shows me what I tweeted and when – almost a permanent part of things.

   Wish #3: I wish I could link multiple Twitter accounts as sometimes I may want to tweet things just to my students as related to reading or to Flat Classroom or Digiteen students – different accounts for a different purpose. Right now, they all go to @coolcatteacher.

3. Popular Highlights – You can turn off or on popular highlights. If I’m reading a popular book (like the Power of Pull with John Seely Brown) – I turn it off the first time I read through the chapter – and then turn it on and review the chapter to see where the “Buzz” is.  Personally, this is cool, but I’m not going to let others tell me what to think is important the first time through but surely to point out things I may have missed.  For those who want to turn this off or on, you can do it within the Kindle settings which is now on two pages.
4. Personal Information – Personal settings is two pages – on the second page you can insert some personal information.
5. Better integration with the other Kindle Applications. – I manually installed Kindle for PC to force the upgrade to the new version and the new version is GREAT – pulling over highlights and just wonderful.

   REQUEST:  Let me copy and paste into a blog post from my notes and the highlights.

   BIGGEST REQUEST:  We cannot highlight, annotate or tweet from the blogs and magazines. This is the biggest draw back and something that needs to be fixed immediately.

Heading to the Dillard House and then to rafting! Catch you later!