Tag: Twitter

Social networking reshuffled

OK, now that I’m almost sure that new setup for social networking works, I can give you guys an idea of what I had and how I changed it.  In case you’ll notice any differences between this description and the actual behavior, or if you have any suggestions on how to improve things, please let me know.  Without any further ado …

In my previous setup, I used Twitter as my social glue.  Everything was synchronized with Twitter – my Google Reader, Evernote, delicious, a few RSS feeds, Foursquare, Flickr, YouTube, etc.  Periodically (once a day until recently, now weekly), my tweets were automatically aggregated into a blog post using Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress.  This allowed me to make sure that I had a record of my online activity synced back into my own blog, something that I own, cherish, and backup.

That setup had a serious drawback.  Not everyone is on Twitter.  A lot of people are using Facebook these days.  And while in my previous setup there was an automatic push of tweets to Facebook, it wasn’t ideal.  Tweets are more limited than Facebook posts – in length, previews, and formatting.  Which means that even though something was synced to Facebook, I wasn’t taking a full advantage of Facebook.

From now on I have a different setup.  I’ll still use Twitter as my social glue, but I won’t be limiting myself to only Twitter.  I will push content independently to Facebook and other social networks when appropriate.  I will try to keep Twitter in sync by posting directly to several social networks simultaneously.  My tweets will still be aggregated at my blog on a weekly basis.  But there won’t be any automatic synchronization between Twitter and Facebook anymore.  The con of this setup is that not all content will get pushed everywhere. But it is, I think, fairly compensated by a pro of having tailored content and format for each social network.

Either way, nothing is set in stone yet. And even if it was – things move and change way too often, and I’m just trying to keep it real.  Let me know if notice any issues with these changes, and, especially if you know how to make things better.

P.S.: Yes, if Twitter and Facebook had better integration in terms of links, photos, videos, and locations, none of these would have happened.  “Blame Canada!” (c) South Park.

Trying out Social 2.5

A few days ago, Alex King announced the release of the new version of Social plugin for WordPress.  It’s one of those that can broadcast your blog posts to Twitter and Facebook.  But not only that.  It can also synchronize Twitter re-tweets and replies and Facebook shares and comments back into your blog, as comments.  Now that sounds pretty interesting.

I’ve installed the plugin and connected it to both Twitter and Facebook easily – no need to create your own apps or anything like that.  But given that I already have some sort of synchronization between Twitter and Facebook, I wonder how weird things will go.

This is a test post.

Update #1: Social plugin seems to work really well.

Update #2: Disabling broadcasting to Twitter from Twitter Tools plugin should decrease the amount of dups posted.

Updated #3: It is still not obvious how to keep the synchronization between Twitter and Facebook while avoiding dups.

Twitter Stories

The other day, Twitter announced a new website of theirs – Twitter Stories.  Yes, of course, that’s a part of their marketing effort and they are promoting their own services.  But it’s not just that.  It is an excellent compilation of stories which show kindness, compassion and humanity – things that unfortunately aren’t so popular in the modern world of mass media and dirty politics.

A few of my friends and coworkers still doubt the usefulness of social networks.  They often see social networks as time wasters that prevent people from actually doing something good with their lives.  I always disagree with that.  Social networks are just another set of tools, like knives and hammers.  What is done with them depends entirely on people using them.  If people are wasting time of their lives, then they would be doing so regardless of the availability of social networks.  And on the contrary, if people are to do great things, social networks will be just another tool for them to find the need and the way to help it.  Showcasing that is what Twitter Stories is all about.

 

 

 

Twitter – social glue that is here to stay

Today, while playing around with the Lovely Charts, I decided to make a quick diagram of a few social networks that I use.  The purpose of the diagram is to illustrate why Twitter is here to stay.  Here is the diagram itself.

As you can see, I use Twitter as a glue.  It aggregates favorites, likes, shares, bookmarks, etc from all other social networks that I use.  These are all gathered together and automatically published back into my own blog as ‘Day in brief’ summaries.   This way, I can own most of my social activities in the space, which I actually own – my blog.  So even if a social network dies out and disappears, I still have bits and pieces of content in my archives.

As for the Facebook, I don’t really use it so much myself, but a lot of people find it more convenient to follow me there than anywhere else.  So I configured Twitter to forward all tweets there too.  And since my WordPress blog is tweeting every post I publish, I get a very nice exposure overall.

Since Twitter is so simple and popular, pretty much every web service and social network does some sort of integration with it.  It would be way more complicated to configure integration between my WordPress blog and each and every social network that I use.  I’ve recently learned that quite a few people use Twitter the same way.  That’s something that no other social network gives you yet.  Google+ is a good potential candidate, but it still has no APIs.  And Facebook could do it easily  if it wasn’t for their moronic attitude towards exporting users’ own data.

P.S.: Thanks to all those people who made the social networks logos that I used in my diagram.