SuperSatellite

Social Web: Gearing up without burning out

// March 7th, 2008 // Web

The Experiment: Do more with less. Could I increase my “presence” within the “social web” without increasing time or labor to do so, and without having to navigate through a dozen sites a day in order to keep up?

I mentioned this little experiment in my post yesterday, and thought I’d go into it a little bit more and get some feedback and your thoughts on ways I could improve on my process. With the tools out there now, it is getting easier to consolidate things that you do into one place. Google was the first place I tried some of this at, and I rather liked it. Their Google Personalized Home (iGoogle) was great for bringing in a handful of my favorite RSS feeds, and a couple other tools like movie listings and the weather. I stuck with it for quite a while, until recently, when I discovered NetVibes. NetVibes is basically iGoogle on steroids. The features are better, widgets are more controllable, and the site feels more responsive and useful.

Since I’ve used NetVibes the past couple months, I decided I’d use that as my launching pad. They also just upgraded to the Ginger version, which has an option called the Universe page in the spirit of social media that is a page you can share widgets with other people at. I am not yet doing this, but will probably expand to it as the experiment progresses.

The first thing I did was to take RSS feeds from every site I visit regularly: PerezHilton.com (shut up, like you don’t have vices), Astronomy Picture of the Day, Motivational Images, The Middle Way, NFL.com, and others. This allows me to keep up with all of those, without needing to actually go to the sites. It’s all tossed onto a tab in NetVibes, so I know when new stuff is out there.  Granted, some sites only offer excerpts in their RSS feed, and not full articles, so in some cases I would have to leave NetVibes to visit the site.  Turns out that a lot of sites do offer full posts in their RSS though.  I’m already finding this useful.
Next, I started thinking about social web sites that I am a part of. Any of us might have several accounts like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, DeviantArt, Ning, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, or any of a million others. I needed to start piling up on more of these, as part of this project is to do more social networking, but with less time. Twitter is the first I’ve taken on, largely because I hate the idea of it, which means I need to understand it better. Off I go back to NetVibes, where I find a Twitter Widget. I also find a Twitter application for Facebook and install that, to help tie different social sites of mine together. Plus there’s the Twitter plugin for Wordpress I have on my blog now (and my blog also has plugins to feed posts to my MySpace and Facebook pages, for further social integration). So, as far as Twitter goes, I can keep up on it wherever I might be.

I also pulled in a Facebook widget for Netvibes, so that I don’t have to visit Facebook to keep up on what my network there is doing. The MySpace widget I found was not so useful, unfortunately, because they do not have the same open API (Application Program Interface) sites like Twitter and Facebook are adopting. Boo MySpace (add it to the list of things that suck about that site).  Now I have a tab in NetVibes that will serve as my social nexus, if you will.  As I start working with other networking sites, I will try to tie them to that tab, so that I can use it all in one place.  I’m also open to suggestions for social tools I should try out.

So, that’s the long and short of it.  Make NetVibes bridge the gap to sites I visit regularly, and build in tools where I can keep up a social web presence in one tab so that I’m not continuously bouncing around sites.  This is what their site is for after all, creating a personal web dashboard, so I want to see how far I can push it.  So far, I’m not unhappy with how the mold is forming.  I’ll keep up with how it’s going on here once in a while, and I’ll even tweet about it from time to time when necessary.