Here’s a list of the social networks I’m actively participating in:
Then there’s the ones I have accounts in but don’t use all that much:
I’m sure I’m forgetting a few too. Add the fact that in some of these services (Flickr, YouTube, blogging) I have access to multiple accounts, one personal, one work. (Blip.tv is only work right now. I don’t have a personal account there.)
Here’s the problem: when I find something interesting online or have something to say, how should I share it?
I’ve got four bookmarklets set up; BlogThis, TwitThis, TumblThis, and TwitThis, along with the Share+ button on the Facebook toolbar, which makes posting to those sites a simple process. But each one has a different audience (if any audience at all) with different levels of immediacy. (For example, if I post it to my blog, only my subscribers will read it but maybe not for a few hours or days. If I post it to Facebook, only my Facebook friends will see it albeit a bit quicker. If I put it out to Twitter, only my Twitter followers will see it but within minutes.) Additionally, Twitter posts need to be kept to 140 characters, my Tumblog can contain more but I usually don’t, del.icio.us is for stuff I want to go back to later or share with my classes, and my blog is for more extensive writing even though I post short stuff there too.
Well I could, and do sometimes, post the same content, or various versions of the same content, to multiple services. For example, I put a link to my blog review of my new keyboard on Twitter. Why didn’t I also share it on Facebook? I have no idea. It just didn’t occur to me until I wrote the previous sentence.
I have a pseudo-solution and that’s my Jaiku account. Jaiku allows me to pull in content from all of my other accounts that are outputting feeds. So, if you visit my Jaiku page or subscribe to my Jaiku feed, you’ll get all of the content from almost every other service I post to. (There’s no way to pull in Facebook info that I can find so there’s one notable exception.) The trouble is, there’s no one in my extended circle of friends using Jaiku with two notable exceptions (planetneutral and jessamyn) and they don’t seem to be doing much with it anyway. So, is a “solution” really a solution if no one uses it? I don’t think so.
So, how do you handle it? Do you just pick a favorite and stick to it? Do you clearly delineate in your own mind what goes where and not worry about who’s at the receiving end? I’d really like to know.
I created a “mega feed” that’s available to people via a link at the top of my web page. (http://nirak.net/) I did this by subscribing to the items I wanted in the feed via google reader (del.icio.us, flickr, several blogs and other services) tagging them “combined feed”, and then making that feed public. I then ran it through feedburner, just in case I ever want to use a different service (though feedburner is Google now, too).
However, the feed is unwieldy. If I’m uploading a lot of pictures and bookmarking a lot, I can easily add 50 items in a day. I don’t expect many people will want all that in their feedreader. I don’t use facebook and myspace much because they don’t have RSS- I use Ning more frequently because it does. I’ve thought of using tags to export a more focused combined feed- perhaps one with only library related items.
Part of the reason I have not used Twitter (though it’s looking more and more attractive) is because I don’t want to further dilute my online presence any more than it already is.
PS- google’s CAPTCHA is consistently the hardest I’ve come across. grr.
I really just do whatever I feel like at the time. For me, it’s all about playing with the tools and interacting with people. If people are really that interested in what you’re doing, they’ll figure it out.