Feeding the Social Media Beast – Part I: The Prelude

beast-man It started a couple months back. One of my Twitter and Facebook Subscribers asked me why I was posting the same Status Updates in both places. It turned out, I wasn’t. I had installed the Twitter app that synced my twitter to my facebook status (not the other way). It was time saving, and seemed right.

However, as I started to post more to Twitter, it became apparent that there was only a small subset of tweets that should make it to Facebook (for my purposes, I can’t think of any facebook status update that isnt a tweet). I found a different Facebook app that allowed selective tweeting based on a #FB (hashtag). But there was an intrinsic problem with it:

It flared my skeptical side.

Why? Because I’m simply tired and hesitant to give out all my social media account credentials to every service out there. In fact – knowing the poor state of security and password maintenance out there – I really think that we will see an avalanche of security issues simply from social media credential sharing.

UPDATE: Post on similar security concerns

Side Note: Why doesn’t one of the larger trusted sources act as a credential proxy? Or is that what opensocial is supposed to? I guess I need to look into that more.

So because of my paranoia, I just left all tweets going to Facebook. Case Closed.

Eventually, curiosity and desire to tinker got the better of me. I wanted to play. I was already using the Facebook ‘Notes’ application to pull in the CRT blog – why couldn’t that be extended?

As many of you who follow either @CRTweet or the CRT Facebook Page know the last few days I had been whiney and complaining on getting this idea to work (in fact it was simple, but just wasn’t sticking). Well, I think I have finally landed on a solution that is 90% reliable – unfortunately, it seems the unreliability is Facebook and how it deals with RSS.

The next couple parts of this series will guide you through the creation of a selective tweet feed, the merging of multiple feeds and then finally wrapping it all together into a Facebook Feed that syncs what ever sources with your Facebook Status.

Till next post —

** Actually, this post is also my test to make sure the CRT Blog is still being fed into Facebook ;)

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