My Social Media Workflow
First, there was Myspace. And all your friends joined it. You uploaded all your pictures, updated your statuses, and wrote all your blogs. But wait, now there’s Facebook. Time to upload and update everything on yet another site. Maybe even both at the same time. Weee! Welcome to Web 2.0 and Social Networking.
Now I don’t know about you, but I get tired of having to check more than one site. Or update my status on more than one site. Or upload pictures to more than one site. Etc. etc. So, I don’t. So, what do I do?
Social Networking: Tips and Uses
Well, first I believe in using just one site for each purpose. One site for status updates, whether it be Twitter, Identica, etc. One site for photos: Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, etc. This way each site has their own specialty and thus their own development, features, etc. designed exactly for one purpose. Plus, this way you don’t have to move things to each new social networking fad. Or upload things more than once.
Second, I believe in using a lifestreaming site to tie all the different sites you’ve updated/uploaded together and be able to share your identity all in one place. From Wikipedia: “Lifestreaming is the practice of collecting an online user’s disjointed online presence in one central ‘location’ or ‘site’.” Thus making it easier for you to keep track of everything your friends are doing or vice versa.
The Sites
The best thing about social networking is being able to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos, music, etc. that your friends and family are interested in and sharing even if you’re not around. As an added bonus, you also get to discover and discuss new things.
First let’s check out some options for social networking sites. Now these are the sites that I use on a regular basis and make up my lifestream, but of course there are other options out there as well.
What am I doing? Yes, Twitter still has technical issues it needs to overcome. But it’s still the most widespread of all the status updating options. You can find a variety of people and celebs, tv stations, etc. adding to the masses. Plus, there are lots of ways to post and apps to keep track of all your friends’ tweets.
If you want you can even update your Facebook status with Twitter. So, why not create a Twitter account and use the Twitter application to update your Twitter and Facebook status at once.
I’m sure people have their reasons, but I don’t understand why someone would still use hotmail, yahoo, etc. for their email when they can use Google.
I love Google’s GMail, which allows me to add things widgets to the sidebar and tweak the way I see my mail. Plus, I can even filter my email automatically as it comes in. Or add labels (like folders) to tag my email as it comes in or when reading my inbox. Or I can even star an email for later. And
I also love their GCalendar, which allows me to create multiple calendars and set levels of privacy on those calendars and the events within them. Then, I can share my calendar easily with friends.
What articles/news am I reading? And I also love their GReader, which allows me to keep track of the feeds on lots of different sites, tag them, star them for later, or even share them with friends. I use all three of them everyday. I’m Google all the way.
Do you see what I see? The granddaddy site of photo updating. Options for privacy, tagging, geotagging, etc. And you can add photos by web, email, phone, etc. Now, you can even add short videos.
My thoughts. My choices. My words. Livejournal is still my choice for blogging. Especially for private blogging. And especially for interacting with fandom. Livejournal allows you so many options for layouts. It also allows you to blog by web, email, txt, etc. I can even blog from an external blog like I’m doing now, and then crosspost it to Livejournal. And the best part, the levels of privacy. I can create different groups, place different readers in each of those groups, and blog to whichever group I choose.
What are you listening to? It’s as easy as creating an account, adding the app to your computer, and listening to music. Everything you listen to will be added to your profile. You can also ‘love’ your favorite songs.
What have I seen/read/bought? I use one site to keep track of all the movies, books, CDs I buy and watch. Listal allows me to mark something as owned or watched, and even provides an RSS feed or widget to display it on other sites.
What have I watched on tv? Lots of tv to watch and hard to remember what I’ve seen and what I haven’t seen. Orangutag is an easy way to keep track of all of it. Plus, it comes with an RSS feed to display it on other sites.
What have I bookmarked? I love Delicious. Before I used Delicious, I didn’t know how I’d keep track of all my bookmarks on various computers at home and away as well as my iPhone. But now I have them all stored in one place. You can tag the bookmarks. You can choose to make them public or private. Etc.
The place to upload and watch videos. Enough said.
Tasks and To-dos. You can add to it from Twitter. And you can even add it to your GMail page. My favorite to-do app.
Wrap It All Up
So many sites, so little time. Now, it’s time to introduce you to my weapons of choice for keeping track of it all and lifestreaming.
I love Netvibes. I’m able to manage all my social networks from one site and one page. Netvibes allows you to create a startpage made up of widgets that correspond to each site you use. For the widgets I just use a mobile version of each site I use. Very useful. Then, you can either refresh your startpage and all the widgets are updated at once. Or you can refresh each widget individually.
Now, you can create your own startpage by going directly to the Netvibes site and addding/subtracting widgets. But may I suggest checking out my Netvibes startpage and building from there? You can see the layout for my personal Netvibes here.
Another way I keep track of everything is through this best kept secret. With FriendFeed you can get a feed or lifestream made up of all the content that your friends shared. FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from the sites you and your friends use across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get an entry with a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend uploads a picture on Flickr, you get an entry with a link and thumbnail in your feed. All the sites I mentioned above are a part of my FriendFeed.
Plus, there are so many ways to navigate FriendFeed. FriendFeed is also fully searchable, filterable by service, or hidable by service/user. This allows you to let’s say, filter and see just the photos your friend John posted. Or filter to see the photos all your friends have recently posted. And the hide feature allows you to hide a particular friend, a particular service from a friend, or that service in general amongst all your friends.
And let’s say a friend of yours doesn’t want to use FriendFeed, well you’re not just out of luck. Just create an ‘imaginary friend’ of your friend and add all the sites your friend uses to it. You can still follow everything your friend does without them even creating an account.
The imaginary friend feature is also useful for following other sites or LJ communities. Add an RSS feed to an imaginary friend and you have an automatic way to track the most important sites you frequent. Let me suggest adding these two RSS feeds from Facebook as an imaginary friend. The first is the Facebook notifications feeds and can be found here. The second is the Facebook Friends’ Status Updates and this one is a bit trickier. First go here and then when you click on the feed link for My Friends’ Links, replace share_friends_posts in the URL with friends_status. It used to be easier to find, but Facebook decided to disable it by hiding it. Oh, and don’t forget to create an imaginary friend for your Twitter replies as well.
FriendFeed is pretty easy to use once you get started. So the best way to learn about it all is just to dive in and have a looksie at the FAQ. And once you’ve gotten started, you can even get FriendFeed to update in real-time from your Firefox sidebar. ;) This way you can work and surf other sites and still keep updated in real-time. Trust me, FriendFeed is the awesome.
And I know this is a lot of information. So if you have any questions/suggestions. Let me have them!
Tagged as Social Networking + Categorized as Internet
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Great article! Keep this up.
Thank you for stopping by and replying. :)
I liked your list of online properties and how you use them. Any thoughts on a graphic that represents where you post and how you are updating other sites? Have you considered using ping.fm or posterous for some one-to-many efficiency? Great blog name and some good posts! Please continue!
@Jeff: I could create a graphic representing all the online sites I use, but it’d be pretty boring I think. Mainly all the sites I use go to FriendFeed. And then Twitter goes to FriendFeed and Facebook. That’s about it. Is there a part in particular you were curious about or you’d like to see?
And I’ve thought about using ping.fm or posterous, but I’d say it’s not really useful for me and I’m against the idea behind those sites in general. I feel like people use ping.fm to post their message to multiple sites that they don’t even really participate in. Whereas I actually participate on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook where my status updates go. As for anything else such as pictures/videos/etc., I simply post them to their respective site and it then gets pulled into FriendFeed. FriendFeed is my catch all and where people can follow everything I do/see/listen/think and I’m happy with it that way.