Get a First Life: Managing Social Networks?

[Lyonette Louis-Jacques]

Several people have alluded to it in the discussions here. At some point, you find yourself "Blogging, podcasting, Twittering, Gtalking, ooVooing, Flickring" , Facebook'ing, and having a Second Life. And managing the lives of Sims. How do you manage it all, do off-line work, and have a First Life?

What are tips for balancing it all? Integrating some of the social networks to avoid duplicate information? Reducing information overload? Building in off-line time?

Here's the page that started me thinking about this issue again:

Get a First Life: A One Page Satire of Second Life
http://www.getafirstlife.com/

[Lyonette Louis-Jacques]

[Jennifer L. Behrens]

I echo Terri's issues with managing all of this intake. I frequently forget to check up on Ning, mostly because for a while I did not have the crutch of a widget on my iGoogle page to tell me what’s new here! (Contrast that to Facebook, which I check multiple times per day, since the little FB widget on iGoogle tips me off to new messages or activity.)

I notice that Ning does offer a lot of RSS options, although some of them are too overwhelming for my taste (“Latest Activity” pulls in everything-- as in people's comments on individual profiles and new friend requests, etc.). To get just some updates and not those others, you need to separately subscribe to multiple feeds—e.g., one for the general forum; one for any sub-group forums that you follow (such as the discussions going on in the Bloggers Group); one for Events; one for Blog Posts, etc. I don't know why that bothers me, but my RSS feeds are already kinda messy.

To (partly) get around this problem, I rigged an RSS feed for the latest Forum Topics, which seems to pull in both the main forums and the Group forums (at least when new topics are started-- unsure if it pulls in replies but we'll see what it does with this one!). If you have an iGoogle homepage, you can add this feed as a content box by going to the link, clicking “Subscribe to this feed using Google” and choosing “Add to Google Homepage” (if you don’t have iGoogle set up, but use Google Reader for your RSS reader, you can "Add to Google Reader" on this screen instead).

Unfortunately I can’t seem to also pull in the ‘Event’ and ‘BlogPost’ content types on this little hack, so if you want to follow those as well, you’ll still need to do separate feeds (? - someone please jump in if I am wrong here). The Google Gadgets Editor does have a template for “Feeds in Tabs” which might be an effective way to get all of those different update types into one little widget, but that’s all a bit too advanced for me.

Any other good time-saving strategies for managing all this stuff? Great topic, Lyo!

[Jim Milles]

Jen, you could probably combine those feeds with Yahoo! Pipes too.

[Jennifer L. Behrens]

Ah yes, good call Jim! I have not played much with Yahoo Pipes but that might be a good solution. Will have to mess around with the feeds in my copious free time. :) For now, the topics workaround is good enough to motivate me to check the network more frequently, although for anyone who was thinking about adding it, it does indeed pick up only newly posted topics and not replies.