Weaning myself off FriendFeed

I've been using Friendfeed as the central distribution point for all my social activity. Both my Twitter and Facebook streams were updated with all my Friendfeed activity; until now. Since Facebook's purchase of Friendfeed, the writing is on the wall and Friendfeed activity is slowly dwindling away; not that anyone every actively commented on any of my posts anyway. I believe that is one of the major downsides to Friendfeed. They just couldn't attract the average person's social community which left nobody to really comment on your links unless you put a lot of effort into spreading yourself around within the active Friendfeed circles. In end, Friendfeed conversation was centered around the popular few.

I also wasn't entirely happy with the Friendfeed solution as I would often get hiccups importing my Facebook activity. Since Facebook is the app I use primarily for status updates, it meant my twitter feed was missing out. I hear Facebook is coming out with a way to Tweet the live stream, which might have helped, but I want a ensure a flexible approach that won't force all people to go to Facebook first if I happen to post a 3rd party link. This can be the case with Posterous, and was always the way whenever I updated a status update to Facebook. When I posted an update to Facebook, and Friendfeed was working for me and configured to use the original link instead of stopping off at Friendfeed, the user would be bumped to my Facebook data stream, and not to that specific status update. So if the user wanted to comment, they would have to search through my stream to find the update. Not quite what I had in mind.

After I noticed that Facebook updates were no longer getting into Friendfeed this last time (probably after that last privacy update), I knew it was time to pull something together. So I've spent a chunk of this evening trying to figure out how best to set this up from now on. My solution was to use Ping.fm as the major distributor of my activity, with some minor auto-sharing between other services when as required. Here's my setup after the first cut at this with some highlights on some of the workflow and process.

Manual Bookmarklets: Greader/Diigo/Ping.fm
I don't have to do this often since most of my info gathering is done within GReader

Youtube -> Autosharing Twitter/FB/Greader

I find the built in Youtube aggregation within Facebook very poor.

Twitter -> Linked-in
Ping.fm could blast to Linked-in, but not all my activity goes to ping.fm, so this works best.

Ping.FM -> Posterous, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Gtalk
This is now my main distribution point that allows for quick blogging or status updates from a dashboard, e-mail, phone or desktop app. Had to study up a little on the syntax, but if this blog post came through fine, then all is well!

GReader -> Manual "Send To" Ping.fm/Diigo
I share interesting I find in GReader. One more click and Ping.FM will blast it out to designated services

Diigo -> Pre-defined Groups and Lists
I love the way Diigo highlights and caches articles. In an addition this provides me with a great way to feed articles straight into Linked-In groups via RSS. However I'm also considering just using a google reader folder since I have no collaboration happening on Diigo itself. However the caching is a useful option in case the link disappears in the future.

Everything -> Friendfeed
I'm still going to keep everything coming to Friendfeed for now. Mainly as just another way to backup my lifestream. In the end I want to pull all this into a homegrown WordPress install.with a lifestream plugin.

blogger -> twitter (via Twitterfeed)
Could send it to ping.fm, but ping.fm already takes care of Facebook & Posterous, so I have no other service to update about any post that I make.

Posterous
I started a Posterous thinking that it might be another way to back up my lifestream. The existing functionality doesn't quite cut it for what I want to do, but I figure I just throw my content on there as well as yet another way to diversify my stream. Ping.fm will blast all the content for me except for Youtube, so it's not much effort. For the Youtube videos I may just use the Posterous bookmarklet or figure out how to Share directly from within Youtube.


I'm sure I'll refine it as I start using this new workflow, but I think I like this a little better than what I had before. Naively, I feel like I have a little more control and flexibility with this solution.