Please note: My brother and co-founder in VaynerMedia, Gary Vaynerchuk, is an investor / advisor for Gowalla

This weekend I will be heading down to Austin, Texas to attend the interactive portion of South By South West. This will be my 3rd trip down and every year I have attended, my networking experience has been dominated by mobile. The first year? Twitter. Year two featured a combination of Twitter and Foursquare and this year will most likely be 40% Gowalla, 40% Foursquare, and 20% Twitter. In preparation for this usage, I went ahead and downloaded the latest versions of both Foursquare and Gowalla. After playing around for a bit I figured I would add some input regarding the major points for both release:

Gowalla made a major update to their user experience. The app focuses much more on the check-in experience and friend activity, and far less on items. The major improvement to the overall experience is the inclusion of comments and pictures with check-ins. This update will definitely improve the SXSW experience.

Foursquare’s major play was the inclusion of “trending locations.” I am not sure if this was included in a previous update, but this functionality alone will make Foursquare a must use during SXSW. Gone are the days of texting around to see which party is either too packed or too empty – nice touch.

Have you downloaded the latest versions of Gowalla and Foursquare? If so, let me know what you think!

Going to start using Tumblr more often as I continue my quest to produce content on a more consistent basis. You can check my Tumblr out here. My Tumblr will have less original content and will be more of a resource where I reblog others content and post photos, videos, and links I find interesting. You can also find some of my thoughts on Twitter. Lastly, I also blog on the VaynerMedia blog here

Mixergy is a video blog started by Andrew Warner focused on interviewing entrepreneurs. Andrew has done some wonderful interviews, including: Seth Godin, Jimmy Wales, Tim Ferriss, Dennis Crowley and many more. I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Andrew last week discussing VaynerMedia and branding (video embed below).

Over the past few months my blog has received thousands of hits a day from users looking for information on how they can link Twitter to Facebook. The following is a brief collection of links that will help all of you find what you need:

Twitter’s official page on how to add Twitter to Facebook. The Twitter app for Facebook integrates Twitter into your Facebook experience.

Here is the most popular Twitter Facebook Application.

A blog post from a Facebook employee discussing Publishing to Twitter from Facebook Pages.

The Facebook application Selective Tweets. Selective Tweet Status lets you update your Facebook status from Twitter – BUT you can choose which tweets you want – just end a tweet with #fb when you want to post it as your Facebook status – simple!

A nifty Facebook Page that helps you manage your Facebook Fan Pages connection to Twitter accounts.

Hope this helps!

I truly believe that the best way to manage your inbox is to be proactive. Instead of letting email pile up, I recommend “attacking” your inbox by creating a system in which you categorize every email you receive into one of many (when I say many, I mean a few) folders/labels.

The first step is to decide whether or not the email requires action. If the email is actionable, move it into one of two folders: “Today” or “This Week.” With that in mind, try to have an empty “Today” folder by the end of the day, and an empty “This Week” folder by the end of the week.

If an email does not require action, move that email into a general folder. This folder should be glanced at daily, and does not necessarily have to be empty at a certain date or time.

The above is just the beginning of being proactive with email. Every inbox is different and you may find a running theme within your received emails that will inspire you to create more folders. The key is to make sure that your inbox logic is consistent, and to stay lean with the amount of folders/labels you use.

Just for reference, I am playing around with the formatting of my blog.  During that process I accidentally screwed things up.  I’m sure I will be able to have one of my developer friends fix it for me soon.  Until then… sorry!