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There are lots of good networks out there now. These are the ones I am focussing on:
- Adium (for IM's)
- Flickr
- Pownce
- Tumblr
- Del.icio.us
- StumbleUpon
- My blog
- IM's - Gtalk, Skype, Yahoo!, MSN Live
I use MoodBlast to update all these services.
Now pay attention, as this is the current working. I've tried to flowchart each process. 'Network1 > Network2' means 'network1 updates or feeds to network2':
- MoodBlast > Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce
- Flickr, Blog, Del.icio.us, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Last.fm > FriendFeed
- FriendFeed > Feedburner for full website RSS
- FriendFeed > Facebook content (not status via Facebook App)
- Website Blog > Twitterfeed > Twitter
- Website Blog RSS, Del.icio.us RSS, Flickr RSS, Last.fm RSS > Tumblr
RSS Feeds are parsed through Feedburner to add stats, Adsense and interactivity such as 'Add to Del.icio.us' etc.
Why so complicated?
I'm a bit guilty here of subscribing to a lot of services that I won't necessarily use. This is the problem with social networking though - if you don't use ALL of them, you feel like you will miss out on certain groups.
So I am trying to use all the networks whilst not duplicating content.
For example, I did have Pownce also feeding into FriendFeed, but of course this meant that the microblogs would duplicate the posting since I update both Twitter and Pownce with the same content.
The master
The main rule I think is that you have to decide and stick to which network/service will be your dominant one.
That way, the priority is to promote and primarily update that one and have all others, where possible, update themselves from this one.
I'm still getting to grips with FriendFeed, but the concept is a good one being that you can amalgamate this flurry of social networks into it and get one output.
The only potential problem is that FriendFeed is another social network in itself so in a sense, it adds to the problem while trying to solve it.
So decide which service deserves your user-sponsorship and then stick to it.
Try and feed all other services in to it but keep your chosen one as the master AND that should really point ultimately to your website.
With something like FriendFeed, you also have to make the tough choice to exclude some networks and not tell people about them, otherwise you will start duplicating content.
On my FriendFeed, I have excluded Tumblr and Pownce in favour of Twitter.
Centralising
I feel one of the problems with all this social networking is that originally, a personal website was the one, central place of self-expression. Social networks seek to increase this self-expression but at the same time, decentralise your web presence. More of that here, but in general, I think that all these social sites should refer people back to your personal website even if that means importing content from these social sites to have their own page on your site - just so that it anchors all this information to your virtual home.
What should be used for what?
The other thing to decide is what sort of information gets posted to which service.
These are my thoughts:
- IM statuses are for moods. Eg, Happy, Sad, Tired, Hungover today, etc.
- Twitter is a verb. It is about doing. Eg, regular posts about what you are up to - "I'm cleaning", "Just programming today for...", "At so-and-so's for lunch". Same goes for Tumblr and Pownce.
- Flickr is for photos (duh), but should be included in your wesite as much as possible, probably via RSS and on it's own permanently-linked page.
- Facebook is a tricky one - mood or verb? I think it should be a mood, since it's format and usage is comparable to an IM. Therefore, I use MoodBlast to set moods for Skype, Adium, Facebook. Then the 'verbs' from MoodBlast - Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr get microblogged together as 'I'm doing'.
Other things to note
If I use FriendFeed, I don't need the facebook twitter app since FriendFeed > Facebook AND Twitter > FriendFeed.
Microblogs could be imported to html via RSS to website for archiving, thus centralising even more.
The end
I realised that is all a bit confusing, but hopefully someone will benefit from me listing it all out.
See how I also have used Del.icio.us to serve dynamic links to my pages.
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Posted By Justin Fleming to Justin Fleming's Fuchsia Shock - Freelance UK webdesign & marketing, ideas man and muse on 3/29/2008 11:48:00 PM
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