--- title: "Social Media Cyborg" date: 2011-11-04T12:00:00-07:00 url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2011/11/04/social-media-cyborg/ author: Les Orchard tags: [web20, social, feeds, metablogging, ifttt, hacks] --- # 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.) [lucidchart]: http://www.lucidchart.com/ ## 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][recipes]. So, I've gone crazy and created a bunch of tasks that make things like the following possible: * [Pinboard][] bookmarks based on favorites from [Twitter][twitterfavs], [identi.ca][identicafavs], [YouTube][], [Last.fm][], and my [Kindle][] highlights. I'm turning my [Pinboard][] account into both my personal social media archive and a Google Reader sharing replacement, and I don't even have to beg for new features at [Pinboard][]. * [Tumblr][] photo posts based on [Reddit up-votes][reddit], [Flickr favorites][], and [Pinboard][] bookmarks tagged "[to:tumblr][]". Since creating it, I've left my [Tumblr][] almost entirely neglected—but now with [ifttt.com][], I can route almost every nifty image I find over to that thing. It's the right side of my outboard brain to the [Pinboard][] left. * Published items from from my private installation of [Tiny Tiny RSS][] end up shared on [Pinboard][]. This pretty much scratches my itch for feed reader sharing, since [Google nixed those features from Reader][readerpocalypse]. * Starred items from [tt-rss][tiny tiny rss] get sent to [Instapaper][], so I can read them on my [Kindle][] later. If [email delivery of documents start working][ipemail], then I'll have a personal long-attention span newspaper delivered regularly to that gadget. * Posts from [Google+][] get copied over to [Facebook][], because I don't want to pick sides. * In fact, almost everything I do everywhere eventually ends up posted to [Facebook][], because I almost never post anything in person over there. I do have friends and family over there and respond to comments, though. ## 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][book]. 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. [my first]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764597582?ie=UTF8&tag=0xdecafbad01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&c%0D%0Areative=9325&creativeASIN=0764597582 [second]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470037857?ie=UTF8&tag=0xdecafbad01-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&%0D%0Acreative=9325&creativeASIN=0470037857 [book]: https://github.com/lmorchard/tinkering-with-activity-streams [google+]: https://plus.google.com/114487965928288927815/posts [ipemail]: https://twitter.com/lmorchard/status/132482782709555200 [flickr favorites]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deusx/favorites/ [twitter]: http://twitter.com/lmorchard [recipes]: http://ifttt.com/people/lmorchard [facebook]: http://www.facebook.com/lmorchard [instapaper]: http://www.instapaper.com/ [tiny tiny rss]: http://tt-rss.org/ [last.fm]: http://www.last.fm/user/deusx/library/loved [youtube]: http://www.youtube.com/user/lmorchard [identicafavs]: http://identi.ca/lmorchard/favorites [twitterfavs]: https://twitter.com/lmorchard/favorites [kindle]: https://kindle.amazon.com/profile/Leslie-Michael-Orchard/1056858 [reddit]: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6f374b46f1b9a132972b262f2d85b7db&_render=rss [to:tumblr]: http://pinboard.in/u:deusx/t:to:tumblr [tumblr]: http://lmorchard.tumblr.com/ [pinboard]: http://pinboard.in/u:deusx [yahoo! pipes]: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ [automator]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_%28software%29 [ifttt.com]: http://ifttt.com [readerpocalypse]: http://decafbad.com/blog/2011/11/01/readerpocalypse