A friend asked that I describe how my blog and tumblr and facebook are all tied together. This diagram shows what is going on.
Some smart and generous people have already developed plugins that take care of the details for you. I like having everything show up on facebook because that seems to be the best (largest) network of friends. I use tumblr.com to share interesting websites, small text updates, quotes, words of wisdom, single pictures, videos, etc. It is simple to use and flexible. Tumblr allows you to ‘queue up’ posts and will publish them periodically throughout the day, so that your audience is not overloaded with lots of activity all at the same time. The twitter connection is just for the few friends I have that only use twitter.
Another tool that I use is friendfeed.com. It consolidates all my ‘online activity’ into a single feed. In the past, I used this feed to post to facebook, but it seemed to frequently not work, so that lead me to change things up a bit and settled on how I’m using it now.
So this is my attempt to bring all my activity together and do my best to stay in touch with my friends. Online social networking is still in its infancy, but it has changed my lifestyle, and I think it has the power to change (hopefully improve) how we humans interact, govern, trade, etc.
PSA: If there is anyone who is still not using RSS feeds, please take a little time to inform yourself about what they are and how they are used. They allow you to consolidate information from lots of different sources into a single place. I use RSS feeds to monitor my friend’s blog websites, picture websites, news sites, and craigslist searches too. Some of my previous posts about this are here and here.
Oh yes. LOVE my Google Reader!!!