The Lifestream is On
Been working lately on getting my lifestream syncing around to different social sites and avoiding duplication of posts. I wish there was just one place that everyone used but that’s not going to happen any time soon if ever. There are levels of complexity and participation each person will tolerate and each site has its benefits and drawbacks related to those.
The majority of my content is created in 3 places: Twitter, Posterous, and this blog. I use Twitter for anything that comes to mind (sometimes dangerous), Posterous for sharing links, images, or thoughts that take more than 140 chars to express, and this blog for longer more thought out entries. How I get data crossposted and pushed out to other sites is what I hope to describe in this post.
For sharing and crossposting I use features available at Posterous and Friendfeed. These two are key to getting everything where it needs to be. Posterous’ autopost is a wonderful thing; it’s seamless, fast, and highly configurable. Friendfeed’s ability to handle content from just about any other social networking site is unparalleled. Also, Friendfeed makes a great interface for Twitter. Other accounts I use to generate content shared elsewhere are Brightkite, Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, and Google Reader.
The three places I want to try to crosspost too without duplication are Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook. Twitter because that’s where I have the most eyes and Friendfeed / Facebook because those are my aggregators and generate the most feedback.
Twitter Content: The majority of my Twitter content comes from posts directly to Twitter via my computer or iPhone (boring shit like Good Morning and I’m bored). Content posted directly to Twitter is crossposted to Friendfeed and to Facebook. All posts go to Friendfeed (except those generated by Friendfeed, it’s smart like that) but only selective posts go to Facebook. If I include the #fb tag in my post, the Selective Twitter app will post to Facebook. This keeps down the volume on Facebook since the people that follow me there may not understand most of the crap I post to Twitter. Title text and links are posted to Twitter when I generate content on Posterous or my blog. For Posterous, I actually autopost to Friendfeed and let it post to Twitter. This keeps two copies of the post from showing up on Friendfeed. For my blog, I use the Twitter Tools plugin to notify Twitter of the new post. Twitter content is also generated via Brightkite which can update my location and also post messages and photos.
Friendfeed Content: I occasionally post original content to Friendfeed, especially when I’m looking for feedback from other users. It’s a much better platform than Twitter for getting feedback. Everything I do on the interwebs is collected at Friendfeed. If it’s got a RSS feed, I’ve got it connected to my Friendfeed. This is where I’d live because it’s my favorite of all the social sites I use. It’s also the most complicated and has the least number of other people I’d like to keep up with. Oh well…
Facebook Content: Facebook is my walled garden. Since it’s the one site where content is not shared with the world by default I use it to share important items with my closest friends. My Posterous autoposts to my news feed as does my Google Reader shared items. Since Facebook has a news feed and status feed and most pay attention to only the status feed the volume these two might generate isn’t too bad. As for Twitter, well my Twitter feed is published there using Selective Twitter. Selective Twitter is a great facebook app. Just add #fb to any tweet and it will crosspost the tweet to your status stream. I’ve bounced back and forth publishing my full Twitter feed to Facebook but have decided that it’s probably too much for most of my non-geek old friends to digest and it also sometimes gets crude enough at times that it’s best keep on just Twitter. I don’t publish direct Facebook status updates anywhere but Facebook.
One annoyance I have discovered, I like to use Posterous to publish photos to Twitter and Flickr but any photo included in a Posterous post goes to Flickr. Lots of times I’ll include a picture as an insert to a quick link post and don’t really want those going to Flickr. Still looking for a solution to that.
All of this is an ever changing system. New sites come and go along with new ways of viewing the data. Hope this helped you out a bit if this was something you were looking to do. For me, writing it down is just a way of working it all out in my own head.
July 20th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Don’t think I like the font here. Seems too small by default too.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:11 am
This is a new theme I’m trying out, not an original by myself. The font used in Windows is Calibri and it does render a bit small. I like the look though.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:14 am
The ‘look’ is fine but the font is too small and it seems to almost fade in and out with some letters like ‘w’ very faint while others like ‘r’ seeming very bold. I think it would work better if you could just change the font. After that if it’s still a mess maybe make the font larger. What is it at now 8?
July 20th, 2009 at 10:18 am
It’s 13px, which is about right. You need a new LCD or need to tune your ClearType. This font is made for use with it and looks great here. It is small, but that’s ok.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:41 am
First cleartype wasn’t on. Second it does look better now that I’ve turned it back on. I’m not sure why it was off in the first place. Third, I still think the font is too small in the main section of the blog.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Do you have any comments on this actual post?
July 20th, 2009 at 10:57 am
What post? FONTS man!
July 20th, 2009 at 11:07 am
OK, I’ll try to comment but all I have to say is that I don’t really use facebook for much of anything. It gets the dregs of my posts from other places. I just don’t use it for much more than “Knighthood”, which honestly, is a STUPID game. Do you actually carry on very many conversations there?
July 20th, 2009 at 11:26 am
I don’t have as many as Friendfeed or Twitter but I do talk to a lot of people I went to high school with and friends from the Coast that aren’t on any other service besides FB. My oldest, longtime friends are on FB and I tend to talk to them a lot more now that before FB. It’s nice for that.
July 20th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
I guess I don’t because most of those old high school folks aren’t using FB and the ones that are mostly seem to post up “God’s message of the day” and “what idiotic 80’s movie/trend/song are you?” type stuff.