Tip: Gmail Can Be a Social Network Aggregator
So we remain split on whether to call it a "social graph," but one thing I think we can all agree on, is that many of us are suffering from social network overload. Facebook, and MySpace, and LinkedIn, and Twitter, and Digg, and del.icio.us, and... oh my. We each only have so much attention to give and it can be hard to keep up with all our of social networking -- especially when our network of friends is spread across a number of duplicate services.
Blogger and PR guy Steve Rubel has a solution: use Gmail. In a post yesterday Steve outlined how to turn Gmail into what he calls a "Social Network Hub" which aggregates activity from friends across multiple networks and even lets him post status messages via email.
Steve focuses on Gmail and Facebook in his post but writes that his tips will generally work with any social network that provides alerts via RSS, SMS, or email, and with basically any email service. He goes over how to receive status updates from Twitter and Facebook via email, how to post status updates via email, how to use filters to create individual records for each of your friends, and even how to weed out your best friends from all the noise.
These are good tips and a nice way to organize much of your social networking activity around a single hub that you already use. Do you have any tips for cutting through the social network overload? Leave your ideas in the comments below.
Photo credit: wiseacre
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I'm so fed up with google... I'm using gmail myself, but nothing extraordinary compared to other major email providers like Yahoo or Hotmail. Stop doing free advertising for them and you will soon complain their domination threatens innovation.
Chris Anderson posted today on his Long Tail site that social networking should be a feature, not a destination. I agree SO MUCH!
Social networking doesn't seem to justify the time spent on it. It's sucking us all in and literally sucking the life out of us. Don't use Gmail to help, just stop doing so much social networking! ;)
The key problem is indeed that all the social networks are focused on being the destination rather than a feature.
The Web is essentially structured as pages of content, and the problem is that the people layer is being forced into that same structure. People should be implemented as a separate layer of the Web, instead of as more pages. If you did that, you could index the people in a much different way and make social networking a feature of the browser (or any other software/service).
Imagine browsing at nordstrom.com and being able to refer to your network of friends who are relevant to those shoes you're looking at (without having to interrupt your browsing experience). What if everytime you searched Google, you could see the people online now who knew about that topic, and even filter the Google search results by people attribute in addition to content attribute (location "seattle", age group "18-24", readers of "readwriteweb.com", etc.).
Cool! I can trade my social network overload for even more email overload!
Well, i just found fuser.com a very usefull thing to manage all of my e-mailaccounts and (two) social networks. As it is still very beta, a lot of services (c/sh)ould be added soon and that will probably ease my life a little. For the moment, i'm still addicted to my netvibes.com & del.icio.us to get my things organised.
I really think the next big thing is not only a feature that aggregates content but also acts to distribute (push) content to all services & profiles you have.
I tried fuser- didn't like it that much.
I don't like my emails mixing together- if I own 2 emails accounts, it's because I want a separation of some sort.
Social networks, however, must be aggregated for their users sanity. It's just madness keeping track of more than one without any tool.
I use 8hands and I'm pretty pleased with it. It's a desktop tool, so I get notifications even when my browser isn't open.