Social Network Propagation

Here's how it goes:

So if I post something to this blog (like this post), it is automatically posted as a note on Facebook and on Buzz. Handy, no? But that means that if you subscribe to the blog's RSS feed, and are friend with me on Facebook, you get spammed twice for every blog post I make.

My main problem with managing my social networks, is that my audience is different for each one (I think Dave and Jen are the only two who read the blog, are friends in Facebook and Buzz, and subscribe to my YouTube channel). This means that when I want to release a new piece of media, I have to upload it or link it in several places, which means some people hear about it multiple times.

For instance, suppose I take a picture of Damien and want to share it. I can use Picasa to upload it to Google, and it will automatically be displayed in the BabyFeed™ to the right. Buzz will also automatically be updated. But several key people (namely, grandparents) are not made aware. To solve this I can use another network, say Twitter or the Blog, to alert those other people. But both of those will update Buzz, as well, and one links to Facebook. (Twitter does not... yet. Hmmm... let me fix that. K done, thanks for waiting.)

Not helping this is the fact that Facebook itself encompasses several of the media types of the other two. I have not, for the life of me, been able to figure out a good way to distinguish "Twitterable" content from "Facebookable" text (it doesn't quite go the other way, though). Also, Facebook has its own photo and video galleries, which overlap with YouTube and Picasa.

It gets even more complex since I have two Facebook pages (one for myself, one for Damien). So if I, for instance, make a movie about Damien blowing up the Death Star, where do I put it? YouTube? Facebook?  And whose Facebook? Mine or Damien's? Even blogger has a video upload option, although it has a space limitation.

So I end up duplicating a lot of work, and some people end up getting spammed a lot. For instance, last night I uploaded some more pictures of Damien to his Picasa album. That automatically Buzzes it. Next, I twitter that the album's updated, which puts a message in the blog's sidebar (and from now on will also update my Facebook status). But then Damien's Facebook friends might want to see them, and just linking really isn't good enough. So I post them to his account (second time I've uploaded them, and a second set of pictures to manage). Also, there's a discrepancy between albums. Picasa has some Damien pics Facebook doesn't have and vice versa. In fact, Damien's baby feet album isn't even on Picasa (I am wary of the rapidly-approaching 1GB limit). And I don't think I ever put up Angry Babby on this blog. (I don't really want to upload all my babby videos to YouTube. Somewhere along the way, I actually picked up some real subscribers to my channel (probably my piano music videos), and I don't want to bore them with excessive babby videos.)

It would be nice if I had one central repository of text, images, and videos where I could put things, then check off boxes for which social sites I wanted to update. For instance, I could write this post, then say "update FU-News, Facebook, and Buzz", or I could upload a picture and say "put this in Picasa and Damien's Facebook album, and link to it on Twitter."

And this is not even including my Livejournal and Photobucket accounts. See the hassles I go through to keep you people updated about my every whim? I'm just too connected and too interesting a person!