Lately I’ve had a hard time keeping up with what services cross-post to each other. If I send a status update to Twitter, does it auto-post to Facebook? If I send a picture to Posterous, does it go to Flickr? What about FriendFeed? I had I set up so many different tools that I was losing track of things. I spent some time today rearranging things and here’s what I’ve got:
:: Status Updates via Ping.fm
I’ve used Ping.fm for a while, and I love it. I can send updates using their website or the Pingle app on iPhone, and those status updates go out to dozens of different services that I’ve configured. I’ll still be using it for a lot of my status updates, but I’ve tweaked it a little bit.
I’ve set it to update my status on virtually every service it supports (and it’s a lot of them) except for Posterous. I’ll explain why in the next item.
:: Media Updates via Posterous
I’ll be pushing all photo and video uploads through my Posterous account. I used to use PixelPipe on my iPhone, but Posterous offers a bit better control. I can easily send items to Posterous via email or by using their iPhone app, and they’ll automatically push them to various locations. Specifically:
Photos: To Facebook and Flickr
Videos: To Facebook and YouTube
Also, Twitter and LinkedIn will get notified of all new photos/videos
If I had set Ping.fm to send status updates to Posterous, it would then push them to Twitter and Facebook — which Ping.fm already does. That would duplicate my updates on a few services, which is why it’s important to not have Ping.fm push to Posterous.
:: RSS Updates via TwitterFeed
I’ve been using TwitterFeed for a while to auto-tweet new blog entries from my various blogs to their respective Twitter accounts. It works well, and I’ll continue doing that for now.
:: Google Reader –> Twitter via FriendFeed
When I’m in Google Reader, I can “share” an item and it automatically tweets it out. It does this via FriendFeed; I have FriendFeed pull in all of my shared items, and then I have it tweet out those shared items to my Twitter account. It’s very handy when I’m away from my computer on a cell (like at Disney). A single click allows me to share an interesting story with all of my followers.
You could do a similar thing via TwitterFeed, and either method would work just fine.
So there you have it — my new system (for now). I’m always looking to streamline things, so what do you do differently, and why?
The ability of posterous to receive email forwards incl. the documents is priceless.
Using different posterous blogs and playing around with the different @ possibilities is definitely worth the time.