Working on my social repository

October 6, 2009 – 15:58

Unlike a few years ago I don’t bother registering for websites or social services. Over these years I have registered for numerous social media websites, applications and services. The problem is I only use a very small percentage of them. I really like my Youtube and Flickr accounts but normally I find it to much trouble to keep track of all my social media profiles and updates. Therefore I wanted to do something about this problem, not only do I want my social networks to grow I also want to use them more actively. So I had to automate some stuff, for me as a user and for you as a follower.

First the ‘ easy updating’ part. I found a great service that does all the hard work for me, Pixelpipe. This great service allows you to upload messages and multimedia to a lot of services. More than 120 services as we speak! It works very simple, before you begin you have to add your profiles and services to PixelPipe and add some tags to them (eg. Photo, Family, Blog, FTP). After this first step which takes a bit longer to setup it is very easy to post to multiple destinations using the tags you have entered before. So when I want my family to see my newly uploaded photo I send my picture with the @family tag and Pixelpipe knows where to send it. Another big advantage of PixelPipe are the numerous possibilities for uploading your content, this can be done via e-mail, mobile phones, Firefox plugin, Picasa, Windows context menu plugins, sms/mms or the website itself.

So after making it a bit easier for me to post content to my social networks I want my networks to grow and be able to follow them easily. Here’s where my new lifestream comes in. This lifestream will be an automatically updated stream of all (well, at least most of) my online social activities. I currently have updates installed for Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Wakoopa, LinkedIn, Blip.fm and Hyves. My lifestream still needs a lot of tweaking before it’s finished but is working good enough for going public with. Be sure to add it to your favorites because I will be adding more social services and functionality soon! One of which will be a new website header showing generated polaroids from images found on my social accounts.