Trials reorganizing a Social Media System.

I read a post from Chris Brogan outlining his Social Media System; the tools he uses and a breakdown of his workflow. Interestingly, he mentions how 40-60% of his opportunities come from Twitter (TW). Of course I’ve recently moved away from Twitter and focused more on Friendfeed (FF) and Facebook (FB). However this got me thinking about how I might tap into Twitter's vast wealth of information automatically and reduce the amount of noise I’ve always encountered. Most Twitter enthusiasts would counter with potential for word tracking. I knew it was there, but for some reason I've just never taken advantage of it. I think this was partly due to being comfortable with Twhirl, which won’t support tracking until the next release coming imminently according to Loic Le Meur. The main app people are buzzing about right now of course is Tweetdeck since it provides alot of flexibility with groups and lists. However I’m not in any immediate rush, so maybe I’ll wait for the next release of Twhirl since I'm enjoying how well it integrates with FF.

Nevertheless, I took pause, had a few deep thoughts, and consequently made a couple of slight adjustments to the usual set of social networking tools I use to gather information. I still find Google reader (GR) my ultimate source of knowledge with the highest signal to noise ratio for content. I had given up on twitter for a while since most of the information I read on twitter I gather through FF or Google reader anyway. However there are still a couple of people I follow on Twitter who don't use FF or FB so I need to keep twitter around. In addition, I think there are a few people that follow me on Twitter and not on FF or FB so I've just elected to employ a new'ish feature in FF that will allow me to throw any FF posts to my TW account. Obviously, since my TW activity is generally thrown back to FF, they had to make sure that when FF sent the information to TW, it wouldn't include that part of the TW activity in the FF stream. The only thing I don't like about it is that I set my status in FB which gets pushed to FF. Unfortunately FB adds your name in front of the status text so you'll see something like "Phil Here is a great link on why the US should let GM go bankrupt". Not exactly stellar.

So now that I'm engaging TW again, I thought maybe I'd reverse it and have TW send my status to FB again; the way I had it before I decided to centralize most of my activity on FB. However to make this work I knew I needed to remove the status updates going to FF. But, wait, I want to keep any posted items in FB coming to FF. Shutdown! Apparently you can't add FB posted items or notes without adding the status updates in FF. Then I also realized that if I were posting all my FF items to twitter, then all those items would come in as FF status pages and duplicate FB independently pulling down activity from the likes of GR, last.fm etc...OK! OK! ENOUGH ALREADY!

At this point my head started to hurt and I started wondering why am spending so much time trying to figure such a silly thing out! It’s driving me nuts. What I need is a damn application that holds my whole community, both public and professional, can lifestream any of my services, allow me to control what services are released, to independently assign which services go to whom in my community, and finally be able to comment on anything I or any in my community post. Essentially a combination of Friendfeed, FB & TW. But alas there is no such beast, so I decided to keep blasting FF stuff to TW, any new TWs back to FF, and Status updates and posts from FB back to FF. I have been playing around with using FB’s minimal lifestream capability, mainly because the FF application didn't seem to post all my FF activity to my profile, but maybe that’s because the app wasn’t authorized for offline access. I'll flip that back and try again. Although I did just learn that FB will only allow ups up to 10 posts a day on your wall. What a PITA. It’s that kind of stuff that always seems to limit FB. As well as the fact that there are too few people who use FB as a professional tool as opposed to their personal one.

Since most of the world seem to have either a FB account or a Google account, would one of you guys please make this all work for me! I think it would almost all work if FF would allow me to send status updates to Facebook like they do TW. But that doesn’t appear to be on their horizon just yet.

University of the People

Just read a Tweet from @karlfisch referring to the University of the People (UoP). I’ve had a number of discussions over the past week where I’ve thrown out my opinion, wanted or not (as usual), on the incredibly disruptive influence the educational potential of global learning resources on the Internet will have on traditional University and College systems. Will Richardson has some great posts on the tread mill approach most of our educational institutions currently  follow.

Every institution has pockets of dynamic or motivating individuals taking advantage of the many interactive learning tools technology has made available, and the incredible collaborative resources available on the Internet, but they often do this with very little institutional support. At some point I can see students looking to learn from specific instructors instead of institutions, and these instructors slowly migrating toward a community where they can feed off others who share their same passion for learning and teaching; maybe UoP is the beginning of just such a shift.

After a quick glance at the UoP website, I think there will be some definite challenges in their education gaining a fraction of the credibility of a prestigious institution, but maybe that will come as these students demonstrate their skills in the work force. In addition, if they are taught in fluid interactive environments, much of their time in this education medium could be spent building a portfolio of educational accomplishments that any employer could verify through their online footprint. Lifestream maybe? It is going to be a fascinating era.