I think my latest social networking redesign is over for now. I've concentrated on using mostly Posterous and Google for posting content.

I've broken up my former Looking Out For Number One site into 8 new sites. Each one for a specific content topic or purpose. I've created these on Posterous, because of the ease of posting (mail, bookmarklet and web), multiple autopost capabilities (to Twitter, FriendFeed and  more) and configuration ability (Custom CSS, Domain, etc). It's no WordPress, but for now, it's more about the content and work flow than it is about the gadgets.

I use Google Reader to get most of my daily news. I then use Google Buzz as my daily social platform to keep up with the people I follow. I use Buzz as my destination now, not Facebook or Twitter. However I do have my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts getting updated with posts from Posterous and Google Reader. I don't believe Buzz will post to Twitter in a seamless manner yet, so actual entries made into Buzz itself, go nowhere but in Buzz.

So basically all of my posts to my 8 websites, Picasa Web Albums, Flickr and Google Reader shared items get posted to my Buzz timeline. Additionally, Posterous pumps out the web posts to Twitter and FriendFeed. My Google Shared items while showing up in Buzz automatically, get sucked into FriendFeed and then out to Twitter also. You never really have to use FriendFeed at any point here, it's just fills the missing link to get your Google Reader shared items out to Twitter, so it's set it and forget.

UPDATE 08/14/2010: I've switched to using Reader2Twitter and Buzz2Twitter to get Google items out to Twitter. I'm not using FriendFeed anymore to link the two, FF get's updated, but just stays there. So when FriendFeed goes away, it won't break anything for me.

So I have 2 INPUTS and 3 OUTPUTS. I can shared items I like with Google Reader and post items to my websites and all of these go out to Buzz, FriendFeed and Twitter. It sound complicated, but it works and little effort once set up.

The tricky part was setting up my blogging websites to my Buzz feed (as connected sites). There is a fairly detailed process to achieve this, but it is all using the approved Google methods. It's just not a click here and it's done. It requires several steps. If anyone wants to have their websites or blog connected to show up in their Buzz feed automatically, or interested is getting this same workflow set up for you, contact me and I'll discuss the process and possible support program.

In case you missed it, clicking on my Posterous Profile will get you the list of websites and clicking on my Google Profile will let you see my Buzz timeline. You can subscribe to the RSS feeds or follow me on Buzz. Of course following my Twitter feed will keep you posted also.

OK, I don't get it. How do you carry on a discussion on Twitter?

There are no comment threads added to tweets, nor a way to see both sides of a group discussion on the same page.

Just this evening a prominent tech industry person tweeted that a colleague of his was going to take questions on Twitter. All you had was his Twitter name.

To ask a question of them, I @reply to that Twitter name. Then I have to click on that users twitter page, to wait for any reply to my question. I hit refresh every 30 seconds and watch other answers go by. Not only will I not see other people's questions to the answers I see, I have to continue hitting refresh to check for an answer to my question. Also my Twitter status is full of questions to someone my followers don't even know.

I only see one side of a conversation and my followers only see the other side of my conversation. Using Twitter for discussion is just stupid. There are way better tools to have a public discussion with. Twitter has a very limited purpose. And this isn't it.

It is sure sad that many people are abandoning long form blog posting and other tools very well suited for discussions, in favor of Twitter, the worst tool on the net for two way conversations. As designed, Twitter is for broadcasting. One way, spam included.

Now FriendFeed does solve all these faults and more. But Twitter has all the marketing press and FriendFeed has been sucked into Facebook. Sigh!

I'm not using social networking in the traditional or popular sense. I use some tools for gathering information I want and some tools to automatically push out stuff I do. The exception is Facebook, where I have a small network of friends and family, most of which aren't into my hobbies anyway. So here is my social tools game plan:

Public Sites - All information that I consider of a public nature, stuff I don't mind everyone in the world seeing will be published in one place, my own website. There are so many online tools and social services to post your stuff that it is over whelming. After reviewing many of them and considering the only way to truly have control of your content (and monetized it) is to run your own site. I post everything on the blog first, then trickle stuff out through other "social broadcasters". After going through many different Content Management Systems (CMS) over the years as a Internet Engineer, I've settled on WordPress here at this point in time.

Social Sites - To keep in touch with friends and family, Facebook seems to fill that niche nicely. I can post items to friends and it stays within my circle of friends. It combines a lot of features of the many other social networking sites, but the point of me using Facebook is to use it for stuff that I don't want to be public, but want to keep my family and friends apprised of. Facebook can also pull from my public site, in case my friends don't really visit my public site.

Auxiliary Sites - Then there are web services and sites that are somewhat single purpose. Twitter, FriendFeed, Picasa, Google Reader Sharing, etc. I've found that these services have limited usefulness for me to push out content on; but rather I use them to gather information. For example, sending out tweets on Twitter doesn't do anything for me, but I can follow someone who pushes out useful nuggets of information I can use. Since I joined Twitter to read other Twitters, I can send out tweets, but I rarely do.

FriendFeed is another aggregator of social networks that I joined in order to follow others. So I will check in on FriendFeed to watch what others in my profession are doing. I did setup FriendFeed to pull from my public website blog, so others can see what I'm posting, but posting directly using FriendFeed is of limited value, since they go nowhere else. [[UPDATE: 7/2009: FriendFeed can now push your posts to Twitter. FF can look for posts from even more sources. It's like FF could be the consolidator of all your activities around the web (social, photos, videos, digg, etc), and then post them on FF and copy them out to Twitter, the two popular broadcasters. Using the appropriate bookmarklets on your browser tool bar, can be very powerful and makes lots of noise.]]

I'm not sure yet what the value is of sending anything to Twitter is until I have a following. However following some key people who you trust to feed interesting morsels of informational bits may prove valuable. Also check out TweetGrid. The best part of Twitter I like is the interface to the SMS system, whereas tweets are send to and from your cell-phone texting service.

Anyway, here are my respective social sites:

My FriendFeed Page (Open to anyone)

My Twitter Page

My Facebook Page (Viewing limited to Friends Only)

Abandoned Sites - I've tried out some other services and decided to abandon them in favor of just posting to my own blog. Any of the free photo publishing sites like Flickr or Picasa and such are wonderful for people who can't publish their own site. But with great photo plug-in support now available for WordPress, I hardly need them. I had previously installed Gallery 2 on my site, but it is very complicated to administer and even the visitor side experience was overly complicated. So a simpler user interface but powerful admin interface photo album plug-in is what I went with.

I had Drupal previously installed on this site also, but it was overkill for what I needed here. Now WordPress has a lot of features that now can perform many of the things that more expensive packages did. I am also thinking of converting ScripturesSay.com to WordPress since the publisher of Miraserer has abandoned future product development of that CMS.

Yahoo's Delicious bookmarking network is a great service. It integrates nicely into FireFox and allows you to keep your bookmarks online and available to you on any computer through syncing functions. In addition your bookmarks are categorized and can be marked private. I had a long talk with myself over abandoning Delicious. I would still recommend it for many people, especially those who need bookmark syncing between computers. But since I have started using a personal wiki system (a future post coming) I've pulled all my bookmarks from this service.

The real usefulness of Delicious is seeking out popular sites when looking for stuff. The theory goes if everyone posts their bookmarks to their service, you'd have a resource of just really good websites. That's good for me when looking for things to write about or post to a blog.

The downside is that it is yet another service to keep maintained, when I really want to consolidate my toolbox. So I now post links I think are useful to others on my blog, instead of Delicious. Otherwise bookmarks that are just for my use are kept in my personal wiki.

As noted I am working with a personal wiki system to house my bookmarks, I'll be writing an article about that soon. Thanks for listening.