I use Twitter as my main mechanism for status updates. Until recently, I used many different tools to update the status my other social networks from Twitter - of which I forgot usernames and locations quickly. Clearly, I needed a centralized approach badly. Then, I discovered Ping.fm.
Ping is a service to update lots of network statuses in a centralized fashion, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Blogger and more. However, I like Twitter, so I wanted to update Ping from Twitter instead of the other way around. At first glance, this seemed impossible.
However, I discovered a workaround.
The full update mechanism is as follows:
- Whenever I publish a blog post on Centrical.com, my Twitter stream gets updated by Twitterfeed.
- Next to this, I update my status using Twitter directly.
- Subsequently, the Hyves "who, what, where" status gets automically updated by a tool called Twwwitter.
- Using the Ping feature of Twitterfeed, my Twitter stream RSS feed gets published to Ping.
- Finally, Ping distributes the status update to Plaxo, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Talk and FriendFeed.
As an added bonus: before you add your Twitter RSS to Twitterfeed, you might want to crunch the Twitter feed to a better format, using Yahoo Pipes - to remove the annoying username prefix in the Twitter RSS feed (thanks to Matsu).
The only disadvantage so far seems to be the delay in Twitterfeed. It takes at most half an hour to update everything, depending on your settings.
UPDATE: If you can't live with that delay, there is another option for you. Twhirl, the Adobe AIR desktop Twitter client, now also supports Ping updates. So, if you add your Ping application key to your Twhirl client, the Tweets get sent to Ping directly once you post to Twitter using this new Twhirl feature. Problem solved.
Don't forget to de-activate the Twitterfeeds before you do this, or else you might end up with infinite loops.
