Social Media Cyborg

TL;DR: Since Google Reader lost it's sharing, I've decided to revisit my "social media strategy". I'm plugging lots of things into other things. I feel like maybe I should write about this stuff.


Started diagramming all my social media flows on LucidChart.

This is what I do for fun

Since I've mentioned in a few places that I'm a weirdo, I thought I might spend some time explaining exactly what I mean by that. You see, one of my hobbies is turning myself into a human content filter for friends on the web.

And, honestly, having my sharing habits shaken up by the Readerpocalypse makes it fun again.

The image over to the right is an attempt I made to diagram some of my social media flow. It's incomplete, though: I'm a cheapsake and ran out of free objects in my diagram. So, I had to leave out at least a half-dozen more services and a dozen additional connections. (LucidChart is very nice, by the way.)

In other words, ifttt.com is awesome

In particular, I've finally spent some time with ifttt.com. It's like Automator for the social web. It lets you define event triggers from one site that cause actions on another site.

So, I've gone crazy and created a bunch of tasks that make things like the following possible:

What's the point?

The important principle here is that I'm lazy. If there's a single button to click somewhere that expresses my happiness about a thing, I'd like to click it and have that happiness shared and archived elsewhere without me doing much (or anything) more. The scheme I have now feels pretty good for that, and ifttt.com does a huge amount to help.

The other important thing is that I am at the center of these connections. I don't live entirely on any single service, and anything I care about is archived where I can easily grab it for backups or mashups. Should any particular service node in this web fail, I can probably do without, find an alternative, or build one myself.

My goal is to eventually replace as many of these nodes as possible with self-hosted or at least Open Source derived services. (Though, of course, I'm also lazy and my friends are where they are. So, that goal will take awhile.)

One more thing...

I've got an idea for my next book simmering. And, since I've so far managed to write books about the major things I've done for fun, I feel I'd be remiss if I skipped this stuff. I mean, I sort of covered the same ground all in my first and second books, but things have progressed since then.

What this means is that all the above feels like a warm up for the coding and prosing I'll need to do. I just need to get my shit together and carve out the time to make it happen.

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