My Social Network Spaghetti

Life would be a lot easier if I had a single Twitter account linked to a single Facebook account.  Unfortunately I’m rarely satisfied with simple when it comes to my technology usage, maybe that’s why I like the simple life outside of work.  Once my usage of Twitter matured I realised that I wanted my named Twitter account @steverichards to be mostly a diary, a subset of that diary I wanted to share to my named Facebook account triggered by appending #FB to tweets and letting IFTTT take care of the rest.

Once this was settled I realised that I still had a lot of stuff to share that didn’t fit into the category of a diary entry and that not everyone who followed me would be interested in being bombarded with.  I’m lazy so I wanted my sharing to be mostly automatic, so I settled on using another twitter account @steveisreading for this sharing which is fed mainly by what I read and like on Instapaper. In addition the iPhone apps, Downcast (podcasts), Audible (audiobooks) and Zite (news) are also linked to this account.  Since it required no effort I also linked my @steveisreading Twitter and steveisreading Facebook accounts. 

A couple of years later I starting writing my blog steves.seasidelife.com again, and so it made sense to add an associated twitter account @steveiswriting to the mix. While it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the number of tweets from @steveisreading there is only one post a day from @steveiswriting, I also linked my @steveiswriting twitter and steveiswriting facebook accounts together.

Last month when Instapaper added the ability to highlight sections of articles, I created another twitter account @stevehighlights (steveishighlighting is too long for twitter to cope with) that is linked to a Tumblr account steveshighlights (I chose Tumblr because of technical limitations in Instapaper).  The Tumblr account works quite well, but the twitter account doesn’t make much sense so I might be disabling it soon.  The highlights themselves I find very useful though.

Finally several people have now asked me for a more opinionated twitter feed, effectively a subset of @steveisreading that I manually curate and comment on, a kind of ‘best of’ feed.  So I’ve set that up experimentally as @steverecommends, my plan is to only post a couple of tweets to this account each day.

So bottom line:

1. If you want my diary (friends, family, people who work with me) follow @steverichards or steverichards1 on Facebook
2. If you want just one article a day pick @steveiswriting or steveiswriting on Facebook
3. If you want a few hand curated picks a day pick @steverecommends
4. If you want everything I read, 10-20 articles a day, go for @steveisreading or steveisreading on Facebook
5. If you want highlights from my reading @stevehighlights or steveshighlights on Tumblr

As an aside it’s worth mentioning that the TweetDeck chrome app makes it incredibly easy to work with and cross post to multiple accounts and TweetBot does most of the same on the iPad and iPhone.

This article is an expanded update to the post Messing Around With Facebook and Twitter

It all seems a bit crazy when I write it all up like this, but an important part of my job is playing around with technology, sharing my experiments, ‘working out loud’ and sharing what I learn, that’s my excuse anyway.

The photo today is the view from the window seat (that I call my own) at Caffe Nero in St Annes, I wrote this post here today.  It’s a lovely spot at any time of the day, but I especially enjoy the air conditioned distraction free time on an otherwise hot and sticky afternoon..