Social Aggregation Frustrations

Like most people on the web I post to multiple sites. Some of the different places, other than this blog, that I post to include Twitter, FaceBook, and FriendFeed. For a more complete list you can check out the "My Other Accounts" on the side bar.

The problem with having a presence on more than one site is updating each of them with posts. Sometimes you want something to be shared across all of the different sites, and there's just not an easy way to do it that properly reflects what you wanted posted.

What got me to thinking about this today is my Twitter friend leewaters.

Twitter feeds my FriendFeed. FriendFeed feeds my Facebook. And yet, I still find myself posting found items to FB, bypassing the others.

I find myself doing the same thing. After talking with him about it, we find that FaceBook is where we get the most feedback to our posted items.

The problem as I see it is the posts end up looking different on FaceBook and FriendFeed. When posting to either place you have an option for a picture to post along with your comment about about what your posting. When the one site cross posts to the other you only end up with a link to the item. No picture or comment that you've made crosses over between the two sites.

After digging through the settings on the two sites to see if there was any way to improve the quality of cross posts, I gave up. Instead I decided to take a look at Ping.fm to see if there was a way to post between the two sites. Unfortunately your limited to just text and links for most posts. If you want to post any pictures with your post, you have to do it through e-mail. Not a very effective way to share items quickly on the web.

I'm not discussing any problems with cross posting to Twitter because its limitations are to be expected. Twitter only allows someone to post text and links. So when FriendFeed or FaceBook posts to Twitter you know what to expect.

So what are we supposed to do? Do we just pick one site to post to and accept the limitations that cross posting to the other one is going to be truncated and the full context my be lost? Or, do we set up FaceBook and FriendFeed to no longer cross post, then just post to each one individually?

For now I think I'm going to opt for posting just to FaceBook and accept that in FriendFeed it's going to be reduced to just a link. In the mean time I'm going to keep waiting and checking for the one perfect social aggregator to come along. It's not an ellegant solution, but it's the one that works best for me at the moment.

If anyone has a better solution, please feel free to leave me a comment.

Comments

[Dyl]

This is going to be no help whatsoever - I haven't tried it - and you probably shouldn't pay any attention to this comment - :-) - however, have you considered seeing if this does the job?....

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/watch-out-friendfeed-socialthing-is-even-easier-to-use/

[David]

Thanks for the info. It's rather late so I just took a quick look at the article.

The first problem that I see is that SocialThing is still an invite only service. It's been that way for almost a year now. Doesn't bode well for it. Especially since AOL acquired it back in August. Being purchased by a larger company should lead to it being open to the public by now.

Also from what I saw in the article and looking at the SocialThing site, I'm not sure if it will do what I want it to do. I think we're just going to have to deal with incompatibility issues until the social bubble bursts. Once the dust settles and we know who is going to stick around for the long term, then we should get an aggregator that will do complete posts at all of our other sites.