Must have a strategy for feeds and updates

Taking the opportunity of an earlier than expected Sunday morning at the keyboard, I started Flock (now upgraded to v.2 – it uses the Firefox v.3.0.4 codebase) and looked at the tabs that opened. What a collection! All of them demand reviewing, reading and some of them even require active updating! It seems I’ve swapped email hell for a different kind of purgatory.

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon ident.ca and it’s neat way of updating both itself and twitter from Googletalk (or any other Jabber service). I liked that – thanks to @andypiper for his tweet. However it got me to thinking. What do I use all the social networks I subscribe to for, and how best should I integrate or maintain them?

I then recalled another tweet from Rob Scoble (@scobleizer) which advocated the use of Friendfeed over Twitter as being a good place to comment upon micro-blog posts, but also as a postbox for updating other social networks from.

Now I abandoned Facebook quite a while ago, but a lot of people I know – haven’t and I’ve been neglecting Facebook updates because it was such a slog to do so. After all I was already updating my location via Brightkite/MyLoki, my twitterverse, and occasionally was remembering to update LinkedIn (the one I think I DO need to give a bit more attention to). So should I switch back the feed from twitter to update my status?  No – I didn’t like the way that it would display many tweets that were irrelevant. However, thanks to looking at Brian Kelly’s profile on Facebook I could see that Friendfeed, by posting to Wall rather than Update, would create a stream of activity that my Facebook “friends” could see whilst leaving my “status” blank.

What’s more, because Friendfeed’s an aggregator, everything else in my social networking world would appear there too. So, my conclusion … Facebook and Friendfeed are both aggregators for the two main social networks I am part of. They have different purposes and for me serve separate communities – generally related to work and leisure, but at least I can now keep the Facebook friends a bit more updated of what I’m up to – if they’re interested. If they don’t want the bombardment – they can modify their settings, or “de-friend” me; I won’t be offended.

As for a client for updating social networks, I’ve just about settled on TwitterBerry from the BlackBerry, Flock (with twitter/brightkite) from the web, twirhl or TweetDeck from my PC (I do like Adobe Air) and GTalk from IM. I’ve decided NOT to use SMS – nothing I have to say is THAT important that I want to pay extra to say it!

This is where I am …

A further update on the previous post.

Just found out that Firefox 3.1b1 has in-built geolocation functionality. You can check it out also with v3 using the Geode plugin. With 3.1b1 and brightkite [now defunct] you can use “Guess my location” – it might work, but using WiFi it’s likely to be a bit hit and miss. Otherwise there’s a Loki plugin that will work with other browsers (ie Flock). For more information go to Mozilla.

Then there’s blogloc [now defunct]- an application that takes your location from FireEagle and provides two kinds of map – static (safer) and a live Google Map of your location to paste on your website. So this is where blogloc (static badge) thinks I am.

Once a geographer, always a geographer at heart.