Pushing information back and forth to different services is all the craze these days. While in the past, this may have been non-trivial, API’s and service hooks have made this a relatively easy task for developers and is pretty transparent to the end user.
Why Aggregate Your Information? Ultimately, this is an easy means of sharing your online activity with friends and followers from other services. For instance, people are posting videos all the time on Facebook from YouTube. You can easily make this a minimal task by installing the YouTube application on Facebook. What does this mean? Well, now every time you ‘heart’ or upload a YouTube video, it will automatically be posted to your Facebook account. This in just one example of how this would work. And there are plenty of Facebook applications that cover almost every service imaginable.
Post Once, Post Everywhere. Twitter is probably one of be best examples of a service that other services consume. What’s so great about this. Post once, post everywhere. For instance, when I make one Twitter post, that same post goes to Facebook, Friendfeed, and my website. By having one place to post, it allows me to update various sites, while only having to worry about just one. This is good because it allows you to give updates to friends/followers who may use only one network.
Ways To Aggregate. Many of the social networks allow you to aggregate data from external services such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, or your blog. Here’s a few.
Privacy Implications. Some would prefer not to do things like this over privacy concerns. Point taken. But I live under the assumption that almost anything I do on the internet is not private anyway, so this doesn’t bother me in the least. Bottom line is, if you post anything on the internet, automatically assume anyone can see it and act accordingly. This also applies to mobile applications that provide location based tagging. This rule should judge all you internet activity anyway.
A few years back a friend of mine discovered their parents were on Facebook. If you could have seen the look on his face and the panic as he feverishly scrambled to remove any inappropriate things from his page. On another note, I really didn’t have to worry about that when I discovered my parent were on Facebook. I accepted the friend request without a hitch. I repeat, when posting on the internet, assume everyone can see everything!
Stalkers? Okay, we just talked about privacy concerns when posting information, and we know that you should only post things you feel comfortable with other people knowing. But what about the aggregation of this information in one place and stalker (or noisy people)? A dreamland for a stalker right? Here are a few rules for keeping would be stalkers at bay.
- Only aggregate more general data publicly.
- Reserve more public information for certain networks.
- Check public versus private setting for each network.
- Keep more sensitive information within a particular network and don’t aggregate.
- Since friends and followers can instantly see your information, only friend or follow people you trust.
Final Thoughts. Don’t be afraid to embrace social networks and get connected. Ultimately, this is a great way to stay in touch with friend that you may have never had the chance to before. Once again, embrace technology, but also follow my number one rule for posting things on the internet. Stay connected!
