Monday, January 28, 2008

Joelogon Is: Wondering About Social Profile Status Aggregators

I got invited to join Pulse (Plaxo's social networking play) last week, so I signed up and created Yet Another Social Profile. Haven't played with it much yet, but I saw that it had Yet Another Status Update field, which means that Pulse joins the ever-growing list of status messages that gets updated sporadically, if at all:

status-aggregators
I think I'm wondering about social profile status aggregators.

The composite screenshot above shows the social profiles whose updates I use the most regularly (Twitter and Facebook), as well as MySpace, Pulse, and AIM/Adium (I don't have an active profile on any of the messaging services).

Having just sent five identical status updates to five separate services (each ditches the unchangeable leading "is"), this raises the obvious question:
Is there a service or app, current or planned, that lets people manage their different social networking/profile status messages -- a profile status aggregator?
The ability to choose which services you update with what status messages would be a nice plus. As would the ability to receive status updates from your friends. Oh wait -- that would pretty much be the social network version of a multi-IM client, and a hobbled one at that.

Well, that's the minimum of what I'm looking for: A one-way, multi-network status updater widget. Anything like that exist out there?

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

I use the twittersync app on Facebook, which sets your FB status from your twitter status without the "is twittering" annoyance of the official twitter facebook app. It would be nice if some of the other social networks would make it that easy as well...

Joelogon said...

Thanks, greggie, I will give it a shot.

Anonymous said...

Eventually the OpenSocial API could lead to a solution to such a dilemma. You've got to wonder when we will start seeing consolidation of the social networking sites rather than the rampant expansion that we're still seeing.

Joelogon said...

Yeah, see my followup entry that talks about a frame-based solution for profiles, which is cool (especially if you usually use multiple tabs, like I do), but is still kind of kludgy.

For status updates, it seems especially necessary, since it's specifically meant to be transmitted.

Re: consolidation -- the brand theory folks would say we'd see a top-tier 2 or 3 for any particular category -- the problem is that there are so many categories...

Anonymous said...

Take a look at FriendFeed. Perhaps that does what you want.

Joelogon said...

Ryan -- looking over FriendFeed, it's kind of coming from the other side. It'll aggregate feeds, but I don't see where it'll push status updates to disparate sites.

Having said that, it looks interesting, I'll have to take a look.

Anonymous said...

That is what I suspected... but somewhere on there they mention that they are just scratching the surface of the planned features, so I would think the feature you desire MUST be on their list of planned features.

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

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Joelogon said...

If I didn't have a fair idea who this was, I might be concerned.