Social media
You may have noticed recently that I’ve been faffing about with various social media things. You might say I’ve had a flurry of social media activity. The problem was that I wanted everything to end up on twitter, which I suppose is what I use most. The problem is that it’s all cyclical and recursive. And confusing.
You see, twitter sends a collation of the day’s twitterings (or tweets, if you prefer) to this blog. My blog posts a message to twitter when I write a new post (it cleverly doesn’t send one of the tweets). Also, my blog entries are posted to my facebook account in the guise of notes. That was all well and good. I also have a Google reader account thing, which I use to read feeds. If I share any items using this, they get sent to facebook, too. Also, I have a last.fm account, which tells facebook if I ‘love’ any songs. I haven’t the faintest idea how to change these settings, so I’m not going to.
I recently set up a friendfeed account (copying off Colin, really), which I set up to send messages to twitter whenever I wrote a message in friendfeed, plus all the stuff mentioned above aggregated by facebook, plus status updates there. Also, new posts in this blog were dragged into friendfeed, and hence sent to twitter. This meant that if I wrote a blog post, facebook published it, friendfeed published it and twitter published it; all these straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Are you still with me? It gets more complicated now. The facebook update was noted by friendfeed, which published that. The friendfeed post of facebook’s post was sent to twitter. Twitter noticed that…no, I’ve confused myself. It was all a tangled web of tangledness, anyway.
It not only drove me mad, but it also drove certain Sallies in Norfolk to distraction because there were a zillion tweets of mine cluttering up her twitter (and mine, too). I deleted a load of extraneous posts, and changed the settings so nothing was sent to twitter.
But I wanted stuff to be sent to twitter! So, I went back to the friendfeed settings, and realised that you could set it to only send certain feeds to twitter, so this is what I’ve done. Also, importantly, I have told friendfeed not to post tweets sent to friendfeed back to twitter, because that really screws things up. So now it’s not ideal, because it posts things twice to twitter if I comment on them if I tell it to send my comments to twitter, but it doesn’t send my comments on other people’s stuff if I don’t, so that’s annoying. Still, I think repetition is minimised now as much as I can get it now. I just hope I haven’t scared off my regular readers or my twitter followers!
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categories: Nature and Science and Tech
tags: breaking things, computing, mending things
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