Know and Master Your Social Media Data Flow

This Is How My Social Media Data Flows. I'll Explain.
If you're anything like me, you are constantly creating social data. From your blog posts and your tweets, your photos and videos, bookmarks and status updates, you are creating new information, big and small. You might do so in spurts, or you might be creating new content throughout the day. But with so many different social networks out there, and friends scattered here, there and everywhere, there's always the potential you're not sending the right data to the right place. But if you start by knowing where your data is flowing now, you can make minor adjustments along the way to get the recipe right.

On March 24th, I told Harry McCracken of Technologizer that if I were to provide any Twitter user one piece of advice, it would be: "Always know where your data flows, and participate where it lands."


That simple piece of advice is a major challenge to most people. Whether they don't want to step out of their comfort zone, or they believe they only have time for one social network where they participate, most choose one or two places, while neglecting others. Others simply use services like Ping.fm to send all updates to all places at once, a scattershot process to something that probably deserves fine tuning.

My approach to this problem is to always create content while knowing its impact downstream. Here is what I have chosen to do with my data I am creating.

1. Blog Posts

Blog Posts that I create here at louisgray.com are packaged up by RSS, using FeedBurner, and end up in RSS readers. They also are published in headline form or excerpted, on FriendFeed and Socialmedian. Every day, updates in the last 24 hours are bundled up by e-mail and sent to FeedBlitz.

2. Twitter Activity

My Tweets, when posted, be they notifications of new posts (which I do manually, not automatically) or other content, are posted to Twitter and echoed both to Facebook and to FriendFeed.

3. Native FriendFeed Posts

When I post a new item directly to FriendFeed, it echoes to Twitter, which in turn, updates Facebook. Knowing this, I often author the headline using Twitter language, such as @ signs and hashtags, keeping the headline short. I can then, in FriendFeed, edit the headline to use normal language, optimizing the data for where it is consumed.

4. Delicious Bookmarks

Bookmarks I make on Delicious are shared to FriendFeed, and bounced to Twitter and Facebook. I ensure the headline and the source of the article are displayed, and now truncate that to hit Twitter's character limits.

5. Google Reader shared items

Shares I make in my RSS reader not only stick to the link blog, but they impact FriendFeed, Socialmedian, and the shared item counters, like ReadBurner, RSSmeme and now InFeeds.

6. YouTube Videos and SmugMug Photos

The YouTube and SmugMug activity I do is largely family related, so when it gets imported to FriendFeed, using RSS, it is echoed to Twitter and Facebook (like in #3).

7. FaceBook Status Updates

They stay in Facebook, period, which is why I usually just update it using Twitter.

The reason I list each of these specifically is because each stream of data has a different intent and possibly a different audience. Given much of the content flows through Twitter and FriendFeed now, I make a conscious effort to optimize the data for both services. I also recognize that when I post to both services, I just might receive comments and likes on Facebook, which is happening at an increasing pace.

Thinking about the data flow has an impact on how I behave. It is because of FeedBlitz that I prefer to have more than one post in a 24-hour period. I also know that as I am bookmarking sites that cover articles from this blog that I am getting to reward others who write about the same things I do. I recognize that by tweeting too much I could muddy my Facebook and FriendFeed, and have negative repercussions as a result. I also know that I need to make sure the headlines on my SmugMug photos and YouTube videos make sense once they hit Twitter.

It may seem regimented, but once you think about where your data is flowing, you will find a process that works with you. The good news is that RSS is not dead, despite some beliefs otherwise. In fact, it plays a bigger role than ever in terms of shuttling updates to and from services. I have set up my publishing preferences in this way for me because it matches what I believe to be the right data with its right destinations, and when activity from the community participates, I try to be there as soon as I know it has happened, through close monitoring.

And considering this is essentially my social media creation workflow, you might also be interested in the post I wrote last Spring on my own social media consumption workflow. It hasn't changed much at all since.

Our Doings: You Upload The Moment, They Organize It By Date

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Our Doings is a simple and unique photo sharing service. While it may not have the lengthy feature set and large community of a Flickr or Picasa, that's okay, as it's primarily a much smaller operation, and the feature set built into the service leaves it standing in a league of its own, in my opinion.

Getting started with Our Doings takes less then five minutes. Once you register for an account, you have the option of creating a custom URL for your photos, such as the one I created for testing purposes, or you can let the system automatically generate one for you. Both URLs can be viewed by the public. The key difference is the indexing option, which you can select on or off. If you select "no indexing", search engines are advised not to index your URL.


Uploading is made easy. Give it everything you can throw at it!


The service gives you a multitude of ways to send photos into the system.

• e-mail to publish
  
• Web Publishing Wizard lets you upload straight from Windows XP or Vista
• Picasa photo albums button
• Web form to upload individual photos
• Ability to upload a zip archive of up to 100MB

Why do I like this service so much? Automatic organization of your photos by date!

While the service has plenty of nook and crannies, this is by far the best feature yet. There is not one service out there that I could find that automatically organizes and sorts your photos by date. This is not a feature currently offered by any of the other major photo sharing services currently on the market.


For someone like me, who is not meticulous with organizing my photos, this feature is a godsend. I have dozens of folders on my desktop with random images taken at any given time. The images from a specific occasion in time, such as a birthday party or wedding are easy to organize. It's simply a matter of creating a photo album titled "someones wedding" and dumping all the correlating images into that album. The other hundreds of photos are taken on random occasions, random days and so forth. Most recently, with the birth of my daughter, my wife or I will grab the camera at any given time to capture that perfect Kodak moment of our daughter doing something that warrants a digital snap. It's these Kodak moments that I specifically would like to know the day that it had happened and reflected on the photo album. Now with this service, I can begin to upload the hundreds of images that I have stored on my desktop, and have them chronologically organized by the date that they were taken. This core feature will keep me using the service hands down.

It gets better. Site integration with your favorite Web 2.0 services:


Ourdoings.com offers integration with a lot of the popular Web 2.0 services, such as Disqus. Oh, and did you see FriendFeed is on that list too? They implemented SUP, which means if you configure it for FriendFeed, your images will appear on the site in real time. I configured mine to import my images into FriendFeed, you can see my feed here. It took no longer than 15 seconds for the images to import onto my feed. Without the implementation of SUP, you would be waiting anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour for photos from other photo sharing services to import into FriendFeed. You could always uses the manual refresh link, but that defeats the whole purpose.

You also get a Media RSS URL for all of your photo albums:

Media RSS is a special type of RSS feed that contains rich media assets like video, audio and imagery. Many media sharing and news sites publish content using Media RSS. This is an added bonus, and one feature I'm sure the bigger competitors in the space do not currently offer. Do you have a wireless photo frame? Without getting too technical, it solves the nagging problem of photo orientation.This explains it in more depth. This is something I will use for my wireless photo frame that I have been eyeing for purchase for some time now.

In closing:
I'm thoroughly impressed with this service. It's the simplicity of it, along with the automatic organization of my photos by date, that has sold me. I don't need all the fancy bells and whistles that some of the other bigger name services offer. I have a Picasa account that suits me just fine as a backup. Will this be a replacement for Picasa? It's strongly looking like it. I have not made the switch yet, as I only have tested the service out for less than an hour or so. I would like to see some photo editing features such as cropping and red eye reduction added, but in the meantime this service is something worth looking into.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

You Can Never Have Enough Bandwidth. Ever.

On most days, I don't consider myself a real bandwidth hog. Most of my online activity consists of e-mail, Web browsing and the occasional YouTube video. I'll use FTP to upload and download files to my Web site or the server at the office, but nothing too intensive. Practically the most-intense things I'll do would be uploading videos to YouTube or sending photos to SmugMug or Flickr. I can practically guarantee that Comcast doesn't blink an eye at my activity. But on the rare occasion I hit a wall on bandwidth, and see slowdowns, it reminds me I don't have infinite throughput - just like I don't have infinite storage capacity. (See: Terabytes and Terabytes of Data At Home. Petabytes Next.)

Tonight, as we were winding down from Christmas and putting the twins to bed, my wife and I realized we finally had some time to relax. After a holiday rush and full days, we surprisingly haven't had too many hours to take in entertainment. So I checked in on the TiVo, and headed back to Amazon Unbox to give the service another chance. We found one movie and set it up for download.

Not done, I hit "Input" on the TV, and checked the Apple TV, finding two films to download. One started to download immediately, and the other was queued up.

Meanwhile, the TiVo light glowed red to record a program at 8. The blue light signalling a download from Amazon stayed lit. As no program was done, I checked and found a Law and Order episode on one TiVo which I could transfer from the bedroom unit to the living room unit. We're watching that now as the films download.

If that wasn't enough, I opened up my laptop and... shock and surprise... none of my Web sites are loading. But that won't stop Apple's Time Machine from doing its regular backup to my Time Capsule in the other room.

So, in tally, my bandwidth is being hogged by:

• 1 movie download from TiVo/Amazon
• 1 standard definition television show download via TiVo
• 1 high definition movie download on Apple TV
• 1 standard definition TV show transfer between TiVos
• Backup from my laptop to Apple's Time Capsule

Even if I have top of the line broadband access here at home, it's no surprise we saw failures on the Web and inaccessible e-mail, as I had flooded my available pipe. Even though I'm not a P2P or BitTorrent junkie, I can still find a ceiling.

So, is the fault mine for hitting the "order" button too many times on the TV? Should I buy once at a time, in order, to do a favor to the cable company, or should I push the limits and always expect more?

Which Photo Site Will be First to Embrace Facebook Connect?

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

The news of today has been the coming rollout of Facebook's 3rd party platform services, aka Facebook Connect, to sites like Digg and Hulu, and the opening of Facebook Connect to all. Facebook has provided its Facebook Connect services as an extension to the Facebook Platform for developers to now be able to integrate Facebook login, Feed posts, friend information, and more on their own websites. The service has already been integrated on sites such as CBSSports.com, MoveOn.org, and RedBull.com in very simple form.

One noted fact about Facebook is that they currently have the largest photo repository on the internet. I have covered this before on my personal blog, when they reached their 10 billionth photo. The service boasts over 10 billion photos now, with over 2-3 terabytes of storage space used, and near 300,000 images served per second. The social nature of Facebook just asks for social elements such as photo sharing to be very popular.

This begs the question then, now that 3rd party websites are now privy to integrate with the massive 100 million+ member network that Facebook provides, who will be the first 3rd party photo sharing site to integrate with the service? We know that Google and Facebook aren't friendly with each other - I would count on PicasaWeb to do this. However, what about Flickr, or SmugMug?

I am a firm user and fan of SmugMug.com, as is Louis. I love their beautiful interface, and especially the fact that I can automatically upload RAW photos I take and associate them with their .jpg counterparts on the site. The only reason I ever post to Flickr now is because of the social nature it brings. It also has more users. SmugMug's social features are quite simply, lacking.

However, what if SmugMug were to become the first photo sharing site to integrate Facebook Connect? What if SmugMug were to integrate the limitless potential of the Facebook network into its own site? Let's say I could log into SmugMug with my Facebook account, find all my friends on Facebook with SmugMug accounts, and immediately import them as friends into SmugMug. Then, imagine the potential of being able to now share all my SmugMug photos that I upload, directly into my Facebook news feed, for all my friends to see and comment on in Facebook, just like the Facebook Photos app is currently. What if I could also tag those Facebook friends in my SmugMug photos?

There is a huge void in the Photo sharing market right now for those that could be participating in Facebook Connect. I predict a huge boom when this happens, and they have the potential, with more features than Facebook can provide, to even overtake what Facebook's own photos app brings to the table. It's only a matter of time that we begin to see sites like SmugMug and Flickr integrate Facebook Connect. Who will be first?

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Simultaneous Downtime for SmugMug and Twitter

There comes a time in every site's life when it'd be easier to lay down than to keep fighting the uptime fight. And tonight, for whatever reason, both SmugMug and Twitter have opted out of the process. While life continues to function, and geeks still have the option to head to Flickr, FriendFeed or Facebook (or any other social network starting with F) to get attention, two of Web 2.0's more engaging companies took a much needed rest around midnight Tuesday morning, and as downtime is a much discussed issue, it appears both sites have gone the extra mile to deliver high-quality graphics to keep us amused as they tackle database issues or anything else that might be getting in the way of their standard operation.


SmugMug Takes A Breather
That means instead of floating birdies and a failed whale, we get pictures of an ice cream cone and caterpillar from Twitter, and the SmugMug logo watering old servers in vain.


Twitter Cools Off, Whale-Free
The Twitter Status blog doesn't indicate the reason for the database efforts, though it may be related to SMS delivery problems mentioned earlier in the day. Meanwhile, SmugMug's service blog doesn't mention any reason for the unexpected downtime, but image display on FriendFeed was completely broken.

As both services use Amazon S3, this could be signs of a wider outage, but that's just speculation at this point.

Meanwhile, Google is still up.

When Mom's Away, Dad and Twins Play

My wife is in the middle of crunch time to complete a massive paper for her Masters' Degree program in World History. With her facing a 30-page submission due in the middle of this upcoming week, I've been pulling extra time covering Matthew and Sarah, including virtually all of the last 30 hours or so. Not that I mind all that much, as it's afforded me the opportunity to get more pictures on the record, post some short videos to YouTube and sync up with SmugMug. And while the most ardent followers on FriendFeed (and Twitter or Facebook) have seen much of the content already, I thought I'd share some of it here as well, retaining some of the personal nature of this blog, even as we've swayed heavily toward tech, and you've seen new writers crop up.

As not everyone is as digital as we are, we've had requests from the extended family for more formal photos of the twins, so they can share them in Holiday letters and such. But when everything is digital, it's hard to explain to my grandmother just why there's no such thing as a negative any more. So... we trucked off to J.C. Penney's last Saturday and got the twins photographed in studio. As most parents will no doubt tell you, they were worst behaved when we needed them to be good, and were smiling most just five minutes after we left. In between the cries and complaints, the team managed to snag some pretty good photos. One is below, and all are uploaded to SmugMug.


Sarah and Matthew from the Recent Photo Shoot
As Matthew and Sarah get bigger, approaching five months, they have filled out quite a bit, and are no longer needing to be constantly held. This affords for more "tummy time" and they are now interacting more with one another, even if it is just a quick poke or stare.

Their growth also affords us the opportunity to try out new toys. My favorite (and theirs) is a new jumper to bounce in our doorway. Padded with blankets, due to their small size, both Matthew and Sarah have spent some good time in the jumper, bouncing to and fro, and expending energy until they tire out and beg for food.


Matthew in the Jumpy Swing
As has been true since their very birth, their growth is being chronicled and shared with you. Some might fear for safety and privacy, but we're knowing that transparency and openness is the way to go. Kay Ballard even called it "Family 2.0". All I can say is that as we got two kids at once, maybe it's fitting.


Sarah in the Jumpy Swing
To see all our baby videos, check out our YouTube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/asypta.

The Gray Family Upgrades from Flickr to SmugMug

While SmugMug might not have the brand recognition of a Flickr, Shutterfly or Kodak's EasyShare Gallery, the photo and video sharing site has obtained a dedicated following of photographers who are serious about their work. The site has long received praise for its high-quality galleries, unlimited storage, security, and customization, and the company's small team of 30 employees has managed to be profitable since 2005, when many Web companies have been in the red, largely due to their not offering any free versions of their product. When Matthew and Sarah arrived on the scene, at first I was happy to upload the family photos to our free Flickr account, but the site's limitations, especially when it came to the total number of photos, and quality of those photos, made me think seriously about making the move to SmugMug.

Today, I'm happy to say we made the leap. The first batch of almost 150 photos, starting with my wife's very pregnant belly and taking us to the present day, including the first five weeks of Matthew and Sarah, can now be found at http://louisgray.smugmug.com/, where I plan to be maintaining our online photo presence from here on out.


Editing Images In SmugMug Is a Snap
While I still haven't made the leap to buying a professional camera (on the to-do list), I delved into my iPhoto, and exported the original photos taken since late June. All told, the 145 images totaled about 125 megabytes of space, no small chunk. But SmugMug's easy to use interface let me select the folder, and hit upload, and not too long after, I was seeing highest quality photography on the site.

With the photos on the site, I have a tremendous amount of flexibility for manipulating the images - far more than I could with the free version of Flickr. With Flickr, I could edit the title, the tags and the description of photos, but SmugMug lets me rotate the images, add captions, add a watermark, if I wanted, crop photos, and make color effects - for example, displaying the images in black and white, sepia tone or the negative, which can be flat out spooky. I found myself making a lot of bulk changes, rotating kids from laying on their side to facing straight up, and readying the pictures for display.



A Clip From a SmugMug Slideshow
Given I'm not the primary audience for these photographs, how friends and family can see our kids and their updates was key to the switch. First, you can do full-screen slideshows in SmugMug at very high quality, letting you pan right to left through the collection, starting with any photo, second, the thumbnails sent to FriendFeed are significantly better than those from Flickr, and thirdly, any of my relatives can select any number of photos to buy or print out in their preferred size. Now, instead of my relatives begging for prints, they can go off and make their own, assuming I have a good enough shot.


See How SmugMug Appears on FriendFeed
I've been watching SmugMug from the sidelines for the last few years. I've seen the company's great engagement with the blogging community. Don MacAskill has been a strong public face for the company, keeping friends appraised to service enhancements, community activities and any issues that may come up. The company has been very vocal about their support for "the cloud", and has even debuted a new application for the iPhone, called SmugShot. Once I finally get my iPhone, you know I'll be downloading it.

I don't plan to turn this site into a full-time mommyblog just yet, but if you want to see how Matthew and Sarah are progressing, be sure you check out the SmugMug site. There are even RSS feeds for recent photos and recent galleries. Pretty sharp.