Social Networking Conjunction

The last couple of years has seen a huge number of social networking websites pop up on the internet. Some of the more popular ones include Facebook, Delicious, Twitter, and Flickr. A common theme in several of these sites is that they display a “status” of each member. Sites such as Twitter are built around this concept, where a person posts frequent answers to the question, “what are you doing now?” One puzzle that I had fun working on in the past couple of weeks is how to streamline and update several social networking sites with my “status.”

My journey down this path started when I first wanted to add a quick blurb at the top of my blog called “My 411.” I realized that this 411 was essentially the same as the “status” setting on my Facebook profile. Before solving the status issue, I first found a Wordpress plugin called Wordbook that would automatically sync my blog posts to my Facebook page. It was simple to implement and seemed to work okay.

The next job was to sync the 411 with facebook, and this was a bit more difficult. First I installed another Wordpress plugin called Twitter For Wordpress. This allowed my to set up a sidebar widget that would automatically get updated with a short status. To get this to work I needed a Twitter account. I would then update my Twitter status and my blog would get updated simultaneously. I also installed a facebook application, simply called “twitter,” which syncs twitter updates with the facebook status. So there I had it. I could update Twitter and then my 411 and facebook status would get updated automatically.

Up until now the only social networking service I was using was Facebook. This consisted primarily of viewing and exchanging witty comments between old friends. However, I eventually became interested in what Twitter was all about. At first I didn’t quite get it. None of my friends used Twitter so I didn’t see any point in it. I started to follow a couple of famous people though, such as Lance Armstrong, and thought that was kind of interesting. I then started following a few more cycling-oriented people, and started posting a few more things on Twitter which perhaps some other people would be interested in. At the same time I started learning about another site called Indenti.ca. Indenti.ca is very similar to twitter, except that it is an open-source solution. On top of all of this, I noticed that certain Twitter updates (ok, I hate to say it, but these updates are called “tweets” - it sounds dumb but that’s what they are called) were really not suitable for a new status update on Facebook.

At this point I decided to map out what I really wanted out of all of this joining/syncing of social networking sites and came up with the diagram below. Solid lines indicate a persistent sync whereas a dashed line indicate a sync that is manually set (ie the sync would not always take place, depending upon the content of the update). Obviously I had to uninstall the facebook/twitter application because I no longer wanted all tweets to automatically be sent to facebook. I then had to search for an all-encompassing solution. Enter Ping.fm. Ping.fm allows a person to type out an update and have that update sent out to multiple social networking sites. Shazzam, that was the ticket. Almost. Ping.fm doesn’t update wordpress blogs though. Luckily ping.fm allows for sending to custom urls. This allowed some smart guy to write a wordpress plugin called “ping.fm custom url” - go figure - that creates a widget that displays an update from ping.fm. Even better, ping.fm uses triggers to send out updates. By adding a custom prefix to the update, the user tells ping.fm which sites the update is supposed to travel to. For example, my prefix #up is configured to send updates to the blog, twitter, and indenti.ca. Prefix #all is configured to send updates to the blog, twitter, identi.ca and facebook.

Now that I didn’t need Twitter For Wordpress to sync the 411 and my twitter account, I went looking for alternatives for syncing twitter with my blog posts. For this I now use twitterfeed. Twitterfeed automatically picks up my blog postings and passes them along to twitter and identi.ca. It’s all summed up in the diagram below. The sources are blue (ie blog post or update), conduits that work in the background are red, and final outputs are in black. The final piece to the puzzle was to find out how to send updates from my Blackberry. I had previously installed Twitterberry on my Curve, and this allowed me to send tweets and view the people I was following directly from a slick interface. I was hoping that ping.fm would have something similar. It turns out that ping.fm doesn’t have such an application but they do support sending updates via yahoo messenger. So I know have yahoo installed on the Curve, and by sending a message to ping.fm, my updates are automatically sent out. As for how I monitor other people’s tweets, I still use twitterberry on my blackberry or just browse twitter.com on the web. I also have another program installed on my PC called Twhirl. Twhirl is a slick and small Adobe Air program that can be used to monitor various social networking sites from a pc.

When it’s all said and done, it’s pretty funny for me to read through the above post. All of this stuff is kind of geeky and mostly a complete waste of time. It’s not as if anyone needs, cares or is even mildly curious about my “status.” But as I pointed out at the top, I like going through this stuff and treat it kind of like a puzzle. The final destination might not be anything fantastic, but the trip to get there can be fun.