I guest hosted with Danny Sullivan on the Daily Searchcast this morning and while I was supposed to let Danny rant, I was a bad cohost and did some ranting of my own.
But, really, I couldn’t help it. There’s word that Google is funding this project to bring all of your social networks together in a magical moment of joy and light. Dude. I keep asking for that. I’m not currently holding my breath. I never won those contests you did when you were a kid down at the public pool about who could stay underwater longest. I already know it’s not me.
The point being that Facebook has potential in that I can go there and add apps and manage a lot of stuff. But I still have to update my status on Facebook and Twitter (in Facebook) separately. And I can read Pownce within Facebook, but I can’t update from there. And Jaiku is cool because it shows every time I update Flickr, this blog, or Twitter, but I can’t seem to add the Pownce feed and of course, there’s nothing there for Facebook.
The big conundrum is that I have to update my status in multiple places. I tried twitterfeed, which I can use to update Twitter every time I update Pownce, but it didn’t work all that well. It did update Twitter, but it did it in this weird duplicate way with parts of it cut off. So, that experiment wasn’t quite the success I was hoping for.
Here’s what my update looked like on Pownce:
And here’s how twitterfeed updated Twitter:
Huh.
But the issue goes beyond updating in multiple places. It’s not really that hard. Even I’m not that lazy (mostly). I more wonder if people really want to know about the boring minutiae of my life in not only one place, but three! Surely it was boring enough the first time. And I suppose that’s part of why I’m having trouble with social networks. I’m using them wrong. I need to just pick one and stick with it. Then all my woes would disappear like my cats’ food three seconds after I feed them. (I know, dumb analogy but I feel that the blog hasn’t had enough cats lately. Every blog can use more cats.) So far, people have been going with the social network where they have the most friends, but I suppose what we really need is interoperability, so that if I’m on Facebook, my news feed tells me when you’ve updated your MySpace page and you can still add me as a LiveJournal friend so I can see your protected entries.
Or maybe I’ll just keep boring you all over the internet.
I’m currently sitting on my couch writing this blog entry. My cats are sleeping. They might write a blog entry later if they learn how to type and craft sentences, but most likely, they’ll just continue to sleep. I’m drinking a diet coke. I might have some potato chips later.
Now to figure out the best way to get that updated in all my profiles…. Anyone have a good API for LinkedIn? Surely my network over there needs to know about my cats too…