It's all a series of tubes, Part 1: Ping 'em all and let THEM sort it out.

Recently, I became the licensee for an exciting event called TEDxRochester.  As a result of this event, I've begun networking with a lot of the great folks in my area.  Prior to this, I'd used social networking sites primarily as a vehicle to share pictures of my daughter with friends and family.  I had a Linked In account, but it barely got any use.  Now that I've got a lot of folks to keep up with, and who are interested in keeping up on me, I'm working on changing that. 

 

One aspect that's taken a bit of my time is aggregation.   I've started following a bunch of people on Twitter and I've ramped up my connections on Linked In.  Aside from this blog and the one at TEDxRochester.com, I also write reviews for iPhoneTunes.net.  And, on top of that, I've still got my private connections on Facebook to keep track of.  Information overload, here I come!

 

I use an RSS feeder everyday, so it only made sense that I should try to find a way to leverage what I'm already using to keep track of people.  When I first created this blog, I added it to my Linked In profile via its RSS feed.  After all, as the first entry stated, this blog was to serve as a living resume for potential future employers should I ever have need of one.  (Yes, I know, I should probably update it more often then.)  At the time, you could only add one blog or RSS feed, and I wanted the ability to aggregate everything I write into one, easy to use feed.  I also want to keep these many different groups informed of my doings, but it has to be easy to manage.  After all, I've already got a full day.  Adding more "work" just to keep track of people just wouldn't fit.

 

Since I knew that all of these activities would result in my needing to update my statuses a bit more frequently, I decided to start by simplifying that task.  For example, if I wrote a new review at iPhoneTunes.net, I'd typically post a link to Facebook & Linked In.  But, now that I've actually become active on Twitter,  I would need to tweet this new review as well.  If I wrote a new article for the TEDxRochester blog, I'd have to post it to Linked In, Facebook, the TEDxRochester fan page on Facebook AND Twitter.  I just knew there had to be an easier way to do all of this, and there is...it's called Ping.fm.

 

Ping.fm acts as a central dashboard to the status boxes for all of your social networking sites.  At last count, they support some 60ish services like Facebook and Linked In, but also some distant, esoteric ones I've never even heard of.  For me, flexibility was key, and Ping.fm provides it in the form of posting groups.   These allow you to tie different social networking sites together so you can have granular control over who sees what.  There are some things that I only want to share with a very limited, private group, and there are some that the whole world can see.  I accomplished this by creating the following groups:

 

Professional: This group is where I post things that I want to be available to everyone.  Anything posted to this group is visible to the world, so family vacation pictures wouldn't go here, but if I found an interesting article about some new technology I could post the link in this group.  Anything posted here goes to Linked In and Twitter.  It also goes to Facebook as well.  After all, being a geek, I have a lot of geek friends who might not pay attention to my Linked In profile.

 

Private:  For the moment, this one just goes to Facebook.  I could do Facebook by itself, but I'm getting myself in the habit of using the group instead, just in case I decide in the future to add something else. 

 

TEDxRochester:  This is where I post news about next year's event.  I also post random things that might in some way be related.  For example, my wife and I were watching The History Channel's "The Universe" last night and Adam Frank, who is regularly on the show, was explaining about pulsars and quasars.  I watch shows like this all the time where they bring on experts, but since Adam was our first speaker at the inaugural event, he was the first one I've ever met from one!  So, I posted a quick item about it.  This one's my biggest group, it posts to Facebook, the Facebook fan page, Linked In and Twitter. 

 

I also have a del.icio.us account, so any time I post a link to any of the above groups, it's automatically added to my bookmarks.  How cool is that?

 

It didn't take long before I fell completely in love with Ping.fm for updating my statuses (statusii?).  It's very well laid out, very easy to use and free.  I now spend as much time updating up to five different sites as easily as I would any one of them, if not easier.  If you've got a lot of social sites to update, you owe it to yourself to check it out. 

 

Okay, now that I've got outgoing information organized and easy to control, it was time to tackle incoming.  Being only one person, though, outgoing was a lot easier...