Over the years there have been some innovative sites and services that have allowed users to create content. The problem is, like all good business ideas these sites get copied, sometimes just a feature here or their an exact clone. This leads to syndication, these second rate sites allow to import content from the sites you actually use, the only perk for the user is extending the demographic. The classic example of this is twitter and facebook, there is a huge benefit by importing your tweets to your facebook status, most of my facebook friends don’t have twitter accounts and would otherwise not see my tweets; this turns your social media megaphone up a notch.
There is a programming practice known as DRY code otherwise known as “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, it means that one shouldn’t duplicate code that is used multiples of times. This really doesn’t apply to social media. In mid may TweetDeck, a desktop publishing client, opened their platform to support twitter, facebook, myspace, google buzz, foursquare, and linkedin. That means with the click of a button I can publish one status update to a multitude of sites.
The twitter feed is different for different people. For me I like the idea of a journal and I post as little links as possible, which is opposite for some people who might say the ability to post links in twitter is it’s most powerful asset. One thing is certain, I can post plenty of content to twitter, but should I? I can import many feeds into twitter clogging it up and posting 20+ tweets a day, for instance blog comments, dailybooth pictures, delicious links, image links, video links, news articles, etc. So you get the picture, I can post a lot of links. However there are two different kinds of links, content I make, and content others make. If you use twitter to promote yourself you can potentially make money, and build a brand. If you promote others you help them build their brand.
What it comes down to is this, is there a wrong way to use social media? Should we keep spamming with the same status updates no one cares about or keep everything separate, to the point that some of your content doesn’t get viewed? As an example should I connect my twitter, delicious, dailybooth, and tumblr to another service like friendfeed or facebook? Send delicious, dailybooth, and tumblr to twitter? Keep everything separate?
