Yostivanich

This week has been an inter­est­ing week for me in terms of what I am doing online with my var­i­ous social networks.

• Reduc­ing the num­ber of websites/social net­works that I have
• Mov­ing away from Face­book and more to Friend­Feed
• Lov­ing and Using Ping.fm heavily

So what exactly am I doing with each of these? I have through this week steadily been reduc­ing the num­ber of social net­works that I have tied myself into either because I no longer use them or really never used them. This is two-fold, first to con­sol­i­date my online pres­ence and sec­ond to opti­mize my online pres­ence. I am first try­ing to get rid of extra social net­works that aren’t adding any value to me. There is sim­ply no point to hav­ing a pro­file at a place that I never visit. It’s a waste for the com­pany and for me. This goes into the sec­ond goal of opti­miz­ing my online pres­ence. What I mean by this is that I am try­ing to make my online pres­ence more effec­tive and eas­ier to main­tain. It was a real pain when I switched from a hosted blog to my own web­site recently try­ing to go around and find all the places my name was asso­ci­ated with the old web­site and switch­ing it around to the new address. Sev­eral years ago I switched from a Hot­mail e-mail account to my cur­rent Gmail e-mail account and it took over 6 months before I had all of my then sites switched over. It’s not easy chang­ing data, it isn’t just updat­ing my friends and fam­ily with the changes. Nowa­days I have about ten or so places I would have to change infor­ma­tion on if I just started dat­ing and wanted my online pro­files to reflect that.

This was sim­ply becom­ing too much work espe­cially for sites that I was see­ing lim­ited or no value out of keep­ing up to date. Towards that end I have and will be con­tin­u­ing to delete any accounts that I have on web­sites that aren’t adding value to me or to my online presence.

The next big thing that I did this week was mov­ing away from Face­book and towards Friend­Feed. Robert Scoble also has started to do this as he men­tioned on both his blog and via Twit­ter. Unlike Scoble I am not falling away from Face­book, but then he has a long time ago hit the cap of 5,000 Face­book friends and uses Face­book in a vastly dif­fer­ent man­ner than I do. Scoble uses it to keep up with his audi­ence, I use it to keep in touch with all my close and dis­tant phys­i­cal friends. Face­book allows me to for instance to not have to worry if some­one changed their e-mail address or phone num­ber. I can just look it up there and presto I have the cor­rect infor­ma­tion and more. This is a more accu­rate use of Face­book I believe than what I was using Face­book for awhile.

I used to use Face­book as a way to aggre­gate my online life into one place and Face­book isn’t really designed with that in mind. Instead Face­book is more like my per­sonal con­tact page online that includes all of my friends and such that a blog or OpenID site doesn’t and won’t for at least some time. I don’t see Face­book dying away any­time soon nor do I think that Face­book is start­ing to lose it’s lus­ter. I gen­uinely believe Face­book will be around for quite some time and will be an impor­tant player in the social web.

How­ever I still wanted a way to aggre­gate my online life into some­place that if peo­ple wanted to they could see every­thing that I was doing online. Friend­Feed has been pro­vid­ing that oppor­tu­nity and I’m really lik­ing it. Friend­Feed basi­cally takes all of your user­names to the dif­fer­ent sites that you have pro­files at, such as Flickr, YouTube, Ama­zon, Digg, Del.icio.us, your per­sonal Blog, pretty much any­thing gets thrown into there. So every­time you favorite a video on YouTube, add some­thing to your Ama­zon wish­list, add a photo to Flickr, it gets listed in your time­line. The front page of Friend­Feed is mod­eled off the News Feed from Face­book. Then Friend­Feed adds some nice lit­tle extras, such as com­ment­ing or lik­ing an item that some­one posts. Also if the item is a twit­ter post, you can directly reply on Friend­Feed to Twit­ter. Talk about inte­gra­tion, it’s awesome.

The last thing that I have been doing is using Ping.fm. Ping.fm basi­cally lets me post a sta­tus update to both Face­book, Pownce, and Twit­ter all at once. Noth­ing com­pli­cated about it, just nice and easy. The major rea­son I switched to using Ping.fm is that when I had Twit­ter import­ing my sta­tus updates to Face­book, there would be times when I didn’t always want some­thing to cross from Twit­ter into Face­book. Ping.fm lets me post that which I find impor­tant to mul­ti­ple sites at once and yet at the same time I can just as eas­ily post some­thing at a sin­gle site.

Lessons from this week in surf­ing the internet:

1. Inte­grat­ing Mul­ti­ple Sites/Social Net­works is hard
2. Inte­grat­ing Mul­ti­ple Sites/Social Net­works is important
3. Main­tain­ing a uni­fied online pres­ence works won­ders for my Google Ranking
4. Main­tain­ing a uni­fied online pres­ence makes it eas­ier to present myself as some­one qual­i­fied in the tech­nol­ogy indus­try and fol­low­ing cur­rent trends
5. Some­times just because a site can do some­thing doesn’t mean it should do something
6. Main­tain­ing a healthy rela­tion­ships with peo­ple who don’t live online is a tricky bal­ance between pro­vid­ing too much infor­ma­tion for them and too lit­tle infor­ma­tion for those who do live online and desire more information
7. Many sites make the sign up easy but the dele­tion is darn near impossible
8. It really bites try­ing to change one or two things on all the mul­ti­ple web sites that I know basi­cally live on

I would love to hear what other peo­ple see as more impor­tant, hav­ing a lots of places where you can be found (join­ing every social net­work on the planet even if you never return) or just sev­eral really big sites (Face­book, YouTube, Twit­ter, etc.).