Photo by Matt Rife.
I like the idea of social networking (heck, I’m building a spatially-enabled social networking app), but am still struggling with the idea of managing multiple social networks at the same time. I mean who uses only Facebook? And the complexity grows even more when you start to consider all of the other web apps that you use to manage your life (Flickr is a big one for me).
So when I heard about Ping.fm, I must admit I was intrigued. Ping.fm looks to make all of your social networks manageable by allowing you to update all of them through a single toolset. Makes sense, huh?
So I started to integrate all of my social networks into Ping.fm, but quickly had to make some decisions about what kind of content (status updates, micro-blogging, pictures, location updates, blog posts, etc.) I wanted to send to each individual system. So here is what I settled on:
- Status updates (“I’m feeling sad, but happy.”, “About to take the dogs on another adventure.”, etc.) go to most of the apps. This includes Facebook, Brightkite, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc. Notice I didn’t list Twitter. There’s a reason for that.
- Micro-blogging (“Really interesting read at nateirwin.net”, “Why does ESRI suck so bad?”, etc.) go to Twitter. I’ve decided to make Twitter and FriendFeed my outlets for work-related random thoughts. No reason that I see to post status updates here.
- Pictures go nowhere. I manage all of my photos using completely separate tools and want to keep them separate from the rest of this stuff. That said, there is definitely a need for the ability to put random pictures on the web. I’ll need to think about this more.
- Location updates go to all systems that support them just because I think it is really cool to let others know where I am.
- Blog posts also go nowhere. I will continue to post directly to my blog here (and one that is about to get started over at http://nispatial.com), and don’t want to “muddy the waters” of my social networks with professional blog posts. As for personal blog posts, I have a private area that I share with my friends, but am not really interested in making those public at this point.
So there it is. My online communication plan laid out for all to see. I’d be interested in hearing from others who have thought through this.