We all go through it, a new web service launches and we think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. We add a few friends convincing them to leave their current platform and migrate over to your new find. Time goes by and a few months later you are realizing that you are not really using that web service. You don’t want to abandon your friends, you also don’t want to log in to give them updates. This is the dilemma that many users online are facing daily. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a complete answer, but I can explain to you what I do.
One thing I utilize in my social networks is crossposting. Utilizing WordPress plugins and general trickery I manage to crosspost to my most used social networks where I may or may not have any friends, but I’m there so my friends can choose which social network they wish to follow me on instead of what I am using. Unfortunately what I’ve learned is that I’m happy to update myself on social networks, but most people I know update slowly and don’t produce much content for me to read, so I more or less catch up on all of them via Spokeo. Cross-posting allows me though to update them without me having to manually go update myself on those other networks. For all intents and purposes from my point of view if I don’t log in and interact with that service anymore it’s abandoned. The services I cross-post to are vox, myspace, xanga, live spaces, live journal (which crosspost to dandelife for me), blogger, and multiply.
This however only allows a fraction of the services I used in the past that share my content and link back to my main blog. For other services I utilize RSS feed widgets or even automatic updates that occur via the RSS feed. The services I use to crosspost my RSS feed items are tumblr, twitter, jaiku, facebook, suprglu, friendfeed, and lijit. This allows all my updates to occur over to those sites.
I only interact with a handful of services, luckily services I like flickr, youtube, facebook, and livejournal all import their comments back to my blog. All web services I use that allow for an RSS feed I import via email subscriptions through feedburner. This allows me to life cache.
If you have a service that you don’t use anymore discover some way to import your updated content into it. A little bit of effort that is automatic in the future goes a long way to maintaining those friendships you have on your social networks. It also stops your friends from getting upset with you for abandoning them (they’ll never know the difference).
