Social Media Tech Tools

So, I was bitching about social media sites a while back - and I was bemoaning the fact that since I had a "real job" - it was difficult for me to keep up on all the sites.

Well, I do still hold that opinion, however - I did find a tool that makes updating stuff (at least your "status") a helluva lot easier: ping.fm.

This nifty site (still in beta - but just request a login and in a couple of days they will give you one) - has made life so much easier when trying to post to all those media sites. Basically, it's an aggregation service that will allow you to input all your logins for all the social media sites you're a member of - and then blast your update to them in realtime.

It will also let you post to any single service by adding "@" and then a two letter abbreviation - e.g. Twitter = @tt. Not only will it allow you to do status updates and microblogging - but it will allow you to do full blog posts as well. To post a blog entry to blogger - you would use something like this: @bl This is Cool!^Body of my blog. Ping.fm would then post a new posting to your blogger account with title^posting.

I also ran across some very interesting other stuff when looking at the APIs of LinkedIn (still not public yet) and Twitter.

For LinkedIn there is a webservice widget called "Company Insider" that you can call that will see if there is anyone you know in any company. It's VERY easy to insert into any HTML page.

If you're into Twitter - there is some great documentation on their RESTful API here. Basically, a RESTful API means you can call it with simple URLs. For example - enter this text into a browser (Firefox or IE work best): http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.xml. You will be prompted to enter your username/password (use your Twitter login and password) - and you'll get back an XML string of the last 2 people that posted to you.

You can also get it back in atom, rss, or json formats as well - simply by changing the "xml" in the url to one of the supported formats.

It's basically the same thing for Tumblr, Rejaw, Pownce, Plurk, etc. They all offer a RESTful API that you can get XML or JSON files out of. This means that you can add all of this social media to whatever site you have. In fact, if you develop applications - it's conceivable to create a really cool social networking mashup/dashboard type of application...

Servoy developers - can you hear me now?