Tala Ko

I ended my last entry with a cautionary remark about doing both integration and aggregation with your social networks.

To illustrate what would happen, let’s say you’ve integrated by configuring your Twitter to send tweets to Livejournal, and blip.fm to send blips to Twitter — effectively making LiveJournal an aggregator for both blip.fm and Twitter. Then you integrate further by setting ping.fm — say, in your excitement that such a service existed, you weren’t thinking — to post to Twitter, Livejournal, and Jaiku. Then — in more excitement — you set your Jaiku to aggregate LJ, Twitter, blip.fm, and ping.fm.

If you’re still with me, you’ll know that your LJ will now display blips, pings, and duplicate tweets, because of ping (hey, the web’s a musical place). And, your Jaiku will now display duplicate LJ entries (one via LJ and one via ping), triplicate tweets (one via LJ, ping, and Twitter each), triplicate blips (one each via Twitter and LJ, plus the actual blip) and quadruplicate pings (one each of the pinged services plus the actual ping).

Basically, whoever wants to know what’s new with you by going to Jaiku (first music, then rhymes with Jaiku; the record producer will be here any minute now) will read what’s up — two, three, or four times. More, depending on how many services you integrate and/or aggregate without thinking, (especially if your integrator can send directly to your aggregator). That’s what’ll happen unless either service is programmed to recognize and weed out duplicates.

If you don’t choose just one, these services that are supposed to organize for you will require some organization from you, defeating their purpose entirely.

I integrate Clipmarks into my LJ and WordPress blogs. For my clips to show up on Tumblr, without duplicating, I had to choose which blog Tumblr would aggregate: LJ, or WordPress? I chose WordPress because any Tumblr reader of mine wouldn’t really be deprived of a non-clip LJ entry.

Now, if I wanted Tumblr to aggregate Clipmarks directly, I would have to disable the integration with WordPress — but I don’t want to, because I think the clips are a great supplement to readers of my WordPress blog. You see? (I’ll understand if you don’t.)

To sum this second part up:

Web life with integration OR aggregation: Send a ping-like integrative post to everywhere you post. Log off. / Post on all your different networks, knowing it will all be aggregated later. Log off.
Web life with blind integration AND aggregation: Post and ping. Go to anything you’ve set to aggregate and delete duplicates one-by-one. Log off.

Web life with somewhat organized integration AND aggregation: Post. Take note of all integration/aggregation activity. Integrate those that aren’t aggregated yet. Aggregate those that aren’t integrated yet. Cross-post if you must. Weed out duplicates and fix settings. If you can’t handle it anymore, wait for the rise of a social network aggregator aggregator and sign up. Repeat. (It is now nearly impossible to log off.)

Before I close and go on to part three, I’ll leave you with these suggestions. How do you choose between integrating or aggregating?

Choose integration if you are a member of various networks and post the same content across all networks.
Choose aggregation if, like me, you post different content on different networks. Stop cross-posting selected content and just give each network your aggregator’s URL. To say any more at this point would be to preempt Part 3.