XKCD 672

I really wish that I was as quick as Randall Munroe. I love his brand of satire (as well as his nerd-oriented humour). The Facebook feature he mocks in the above cartoon really does bother me, and he’s captured the creepiness well.

The proliferation of social networking has made keeping everything synchronised very difficult. Whether you’re on Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, run a separate Blog, or any other of the million offerings out there, it’s hard to keep them all up to date.

And for the borderline obsessive-compulsives like me, the iPhone makes it a whole lot messier. Now that I can update things from anywhere at any time, I need to find the best way to make this whole business efficient and simple. I’m still researching which apps will be best, but I would like to make some observations.

Tweetdeck is a great Twitter client. It supports multiple accounts, and can sync your settings across multiple PCs, making it a must if you tweet from work and home. It uses the Adobe Air runtime, which makes it easily cross-platform. It also has built in access to picture tweeting and URL shortening services.

Furthermore, there is an iPhone client which adapts the same interface to the iPhone pretty well, but doesn’t have the Facebook updating feature (yet, I hope).

Another feature I would like to see in Tweetdeck is Flickr uploading. I’ve used these instructions from Obsessable on enabling Flickr2Twitter, but having it all built in to one place would be nice. I’d prefer it to Twitpic.

So, what networks do you use, and how do you manage them all?

Just quickly. In an effort to stay “hip” and “with it” (despite turning 29 today), I have joined the Twitter crowd.

It’s a nifty little thing that, on the surface, seems to be nothing more than a very limited self-promotion platform. “Microblogging”, it’s called; posting every little minutiae about your life. It’s the Facebook status update, without the Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »