{"id":164,"date":"2008-04-28T22:10:24","date_gmt":"2008-04-29T05:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/archives\/164"},"modified":"2008-04-28T22:10:24","modified_gmt":"2008-04-29T05:10:24","slug":"social-load-balancing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/podcast\/?p=164","title":{"rendered":"Social Load Balancing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stress\"Let\u2019s Face it, there are\u00a0far too many ways to keep in touch these days.\u00a0 Blogging hit the scene, but it appealed more to publisher types, not folks that just wanted to have a simple online presence.\u00a0 Then came LinkedIn<\/a>, which is a cool portal for managing your contacts network (though I think if Plaxo<\/a> had built out their feature set a little faster, they could have owned the LinkedIn crowd).\u00a0 That said, LinkedIn is a glorified address book with a little 6 degrees of separation<\/em> cool factor and it didn\u2019t pack the social aspect that Facebook<\/a> and Myspace<\/a> brought.\u00a0 Myspace went after a younger crowd that\u00a0prefer websites to be completely annoying, auto-play music, and look like the 1996 Internet threw up all over it.\u00a0 Facebook brings a bit more sophistication\u2026\u00a0 Folks who want to create a professional network but still want to let their hair down and slay some vampires<\/a> every now and then.\u00a0 Eventually, someone realized that the world really needed a way to IM people in mass, and presto, Twitter<\/a> was born.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure what will be next, but I suspect it will be shorter and easier than Twitter.\u00a0 Seven character Twitter perhaps (we can call it LicensePlater \u2013 CoolHuh? IthnkSo).\u00a0 But wait, all that is just the Web 2.0 stuff.\u00a0 Don\u2019t forget you also need to stay sociable in the Zune<\/a> Social and keep the points coming in on Xbox live<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the surface, this evolution seems like a great thing.\u00a0 However, in this era of hyper innovation (and hyper distraction), the predecessors are not going away as new sites, services and technologies emerge.\u00a0 This means that folks like me are left trying to keep up the blog, build on the LinkedIn network, keep Myspace and Facebook reasonably up to date (and not let my vampire army get too beat down), and Twitter with whatever time there is left in the day.\u00a0 Whew \u2013 factor in eating, sleeping, working, and commuting and this starts to get pretty tough.<\/p>\n

This is where one must decide to give up all together and go outside for a walk (yeah right) or become a master of Social Load Balancing<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Social Load Balancing<\/em> (SLB) is a technique to spread content between two or more social networks or technologies in order to get optimal resource utilization, throughput, or response time. Managing multiple social networks and services with social load balancing, instead of managing a single social network or tool,\u00a0 will increase reliability and coverage in your social representation. Social Load Balancing is handled manually by many, others are beginning to adopt Social Load Balancing tools to simplify or assist in the SLB process.<\/p>\n

Tools are emerging to make SLB easier to manage.\u00a0 For Twitter and Facebook users, you don\u2019t want to be without the Twitter Facebook Application<\/a>.\u00a0 This allows your twitters to automatically update your facebook status.\u00a0 Boom \u2013 just like that we are killing two birds with one tweet.\u00a0 There are also applications that will send your Facebook status updates to Twitter, but that doesn\u2019t seem like the direction most users would want to go.\u00a0 For you bloggers \u2013 maximize your blogging by using a tool like Windows Live Writer<\/a>.\u00a0 With Live Writer, you can write your blog posts (offline even) and then sync them to several blog posts at once.\u00a0 Other\u00a0software that does\u00a0this includes Qumana<\/a>, ScribeFire<\/a> for Firefox<\/a>, and Ecto<\/a> for the Mac.\u00a0 Still spending too much time bouncing between social sites?\u00a0 Minggl<\/a> is a browser toolbar that concentrates Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Myspace into your browser toolbar.\u00a0 If you want even deeper integration, you might want to try Flock<\/a>.\u00a0 Flock uses the Mozilla browser base and adds a ton of social networking capability on top of it (including Flickr<\/a> and YouTube<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0 Regardless of how much SLB you do, Twitter is hard to keep up with (especially if you are compelled, like many of us are, to follow as many people as humanly possible).\u00a0 In this case, you may want to use Twitt(url)y<\/a> to keep up on what links are being shared in Twitter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Above are just a few ways to start to load balance your social life.\u00a0 Of course, hopefully you also foster an offline social life\u00a0and you<\/em> will\u00a0have to be the judge of\u00a0how that fits into your SLB strategy.\u00a0 That said, be careful taking your online social life with you into your offline social life because your romantic evening will tank quickly when your date gazes across the table only to\u00a0see you Twittering on your iPhone (if only she knew what you were Twittering: \u201cdude, I\u2019m on a date right now\u201d\u00a0 \u2013\u00a0 \u201cShe just ordered a double Vodka\u201d – \u201cShe\u2019s looking really pissed right now\u201d \u2013 \u201cThink she\u2019ll go home with me if I ask the waiter to split the bill?\u201d).\u00a0 Finally, I want to plug one more technology that has the potential to greatly simplify today and tomorrow\u2019s SLB process: OpenID<\/a>.\u00a0 It\u2019s bad enough trying to keep up\u00a0with your online social life, let alone trying to remember your login IDs and passwords on all of these networks.\u00a0\u00a0 OpenID aims to drive all of these logins into a single ID system that all of the sites and applications can leverage.\u00a0 Will they succeed?\u00a0 Maybe not any time soon, but the goal is admirable.<\/p>\n

And with that, I\u2019ve got to wrap this up.\u00a0 I\u2019ve spent far too long on writing this post and my status on Facebook has become terribly out of date.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s Face it, there are\u00a0far too many ways to keep in touch these days.\u00a0 Blogging hit the scene, but it appealed more to publisher types, not folks that just wanted to have a simple online presence.\u00a0 Then came LinkedIn, which is a cool portal for managing your contacts network (though I think if Plaxo had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/podcast\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/podcast\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/podcast\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/podcast\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/podcast\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/podcast\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/podcast\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/podcast\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.crapmonkey.com\/podcast\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}