i can rant about social networks on the radio too
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…
No, you’re right. You go where your friends are. Just like you choose a pub or a club. That’s OK, I reckon. As long as you don’t feel you’re missing out on action elsewhere. If you’re trying to promote something online… then I can imagine that you can lose a lot of time flitting from place to place to spread the word. But for just sitting around shooting the breeze and sharing stuff, surely it’s really just about where most of Your people are most of the time?
I mean, despite the surface appearance of the apps and the features, it’s not like any of these things do anything remarkably different from each other.
I go where my online friends are. They’re all on Twitter. Because they’re socially minded media-making geeks who all know each other from places like the Yahoo videoblogging group… and because Twitter is so simple and easy to skim, and because Facebook seems too limited and closed and brand-y to them. Most of them tried Pownce and it doesn’t seem to be sticking even after a week. Maybe it dented the number of links posted on Twitter for a few days… but threaded conversations and file sharing? Features? Who cares? I just want to talk to/bore my friends. And i can’t do it as well there as I can on Twitter.
And I have Real Life friends who are crazy about Facebook because they don’t know anything else and it does what they want. Every so often I’ll pop in and say hello, but mostly I get to talk to them one-to-one in person or on the phone or on email, so it doesn’t matter to me so much if I miss out on their idle banter.
And my wife is a musician and has friends on Myspace, because that’s the SN most musicians use.
Maybe we should be glad we’re not all in one place! The oppressiveness and Total Awareness of that might be overwhelming. And boring. What would we all link to??
(terrible geeky note - in Twitterfeed, there’s a check box to turn off Description / Body text which would stop duplication - and maybe they’ll add a thing that strips the Pownce username off the front… perhaps I’ll go there now and suggest it
Nah, you weren’t a bad co-host. It sounded like Danny did the lions share of the ranting - you barely got a word in edgewise.
[...] have this love/hate relationship with social sites. Clearly. No question. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already [...]
I didn’t get to hear it, but i’ll check out the archives. Next time review may DailySearchCast resume before going on:
http://www.keywordperformance.com/seo-blog/post.cfm?topic=searchcastcohos
[...] I don’t exactly get the social networking aspect of the site other than I suppose you can find your friends and tag them. And I just don’t have the energy for more social networking. [...]