2.0ptimizing Blog, Twitter, Facebook

Over at his Mediavorous blog, Brad Berens is having trepidations about the encroachment of 2.0verload on his personal space. He believes that Twitter feels adictive while Facebook Status is nifty noting their similarity.  The trick is to pipe your “data exhaust”–output from activity you’re already engaged in that previously would have been lost to the channel it was intended–into your other spaces. Read on for some quick how-to tips I’ve used to make this time optimized and work harder for me:

Thanks to the magic of widgets and WordPress, Twitter and Facebook Status are the same on my blog. In a few minutes with a little perseverance and some cut+paste skilz I piped my personal twitter stream to the top fold of my blog layout and those of folks I’m following right below. I used the text RSS widget function to do this and subscribed to the two RSS/atom feeds for both functions. Quick FAQ search on WordPress or Google will help you find more. By just doing this, my favorite bloggers and twitterers are now adding value to posts you’re reading on my blog.

Using Twittersync application in Facebook–it removes the “is” and “is twittering” prepends that Facebook or the Twitter application create in that space–I am able to have all my twitter posts update my “Mark Silva [is]…” Facebook status which appears at the top of my page as well as in the SocialGraph newsfeed friends see from me and what they discover first when searching for me. Btw, I still use Twitter application as a widget within Facebook to publish tweats in my Profile, just not to take over my Status because it adds “is twittering” and that’s just a ham-fisted, short sighted brand over-reach from Twitter that Twittersync fixes.

I am also feeding my blog posts into Facebook via the Blog Friends Application which become part of my profile/newsfeeds and makes it a breeze for others to follow my posts as well as for me to follow anyone in my Friends lists on their blogs (if they’re using the same application).

 A couple other nifty pipes: StumbledUpon, Digg and Delicious feeds–when I see an article, video or other piece of content that I find interesting, I tag it and those get populated in my Facebook pages. This is a killer application that will become a mainstay for our agency as we unite the Collective Intelligence to discover and prioritize news that impacts us. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that within 3 months I will be unsubscribed from all email feeds and rely on a healthy 2.0 Collective feed to inform the stories I read each day.

If this all seems redundant or self-referential, it might be. But it’s all about optimizing efforts so that you don’t have to go from one place to another. Each space starts to become part of the same and the link-backs and connections make the content and context more complete. It is strange to be talking about all of these initiatives as independent and hacks. We’re not at a place where anyone can do this effortlessly. Widgets and RSS are still the digital equivalent of the dial-up modem and coupler–don’t laugh, I actually used both back in 1994-95. It will be a matter of moments when it all becomes more immediate and easy to implement.

In the meantime, hope this was helpful. Do you have any tricks/hacks/fav apps to facilitate in making 2.0 take less time and do more?