New Workflow

On December 11th Twitterfeed stopped feeding my blog posts to Facebook, but the Twitter feed was still fine. The only answer that I could find was “its a free service, what do you expect?” 

Wow. Well, fair enough, it is a free service. I really like twitterfeed’s UI and the bit.ly integration, but being down for a week and a half just wasn't worth it to me, so I switched (back) to  friendfeed. I have had a friendfeed account for a couple of years and haven’t used it in awhile but I knew my password so no problems there.

I am SO happy that I went back to friendfeed, yes the twitterfeed UI is much slicker with its AJAX sliding divs and fading text, but friendfeed just works and I never have to worry about it. So now I have friendfeed setup as the nexus of my online metadata. Everything that I do online is gathered by friendfeed and then published on my friendfeed RSS feed, available here. I have further setup friendfeed to push those updates to my twitter feed as well as my facebook wall. In practice this means that if I share an RSS item, share a video on Qik, favorite a YouTube video, set my status on Google Talk, etc, it will automatically get distributed correctly.  This also means that I only need to set my status on a single service, and it will propagate to the other services automatically. The only thing that is lacking in my new workflow is bit.ly integration.

Bit.ly is a URL shortening service that also tracks clicks. For example with twitterfeed if I shared an RSS item I could tell how many people clicked through to the underlying article and where they got the link from. It was interesting to note how many clicks I got from twitter vs. facebook for example. Bit.ly doesn’t know who clicked, just that someone clicked. I may be able to integrate bit.ly into friendfeed, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

FriendFeed has other groovy social features as well, for example I can “follow” other users and get their updates as an RSS feed and even emailed to me either live or as a daily digest. It also has a nice commenting system to discuss shared items.

If you have a blog or are using Google reader to share RSS items, get yourself a friendfeed account so that I can keep up with you in a single location. :D