One of the most annoying things regarding maintaining multiple social sites is to update your profile with the same status message. You have different “sets” of friends in every other social site and you want a simple way to share the same update with everyone. There is always the classic copy paste option but most people prefer using apps that automate the process.
My favorite way to cross post tweets to Facebook is selective tweets, which posts every tweet as a status update on my Facebook account that contains a specific hash tag. While this works pretty good, looks like soon I won’t be needing such apps anymore.
Twitter has just rolled out a new feature which lets users post tweets to their Facebook profile. All you have to do is login to your Twitter account, go to Settings > profile and connect your Facebook account. Remember to choose “Post your tweets to Facebook” because this is exactly what you want to do.
Once you have linked both the accounts, all your tweets will be posted on your Facebook profile as status updates; barring direct messages, mentions and replies. This is a really easy way to share the same update with both Twitter and Facebook friends but there is a slight disadvantage.
Unlike selective tweets – Twitter’s own cross posting feature will post each and every tweet on your Facebook profile, which will surely annoy your Facebook friends over time. If you tweet a lot and love ranting on Twitter, I would like to suggest that you keep yourself away. I would prefer sticking with selective tweets because this app lets me choose the tweets I want to post to Facebook and not every other random tweet, without any control whatsoever.
In my opinion, there is a huge difference between the nature of Twitter and Facebook audience. The former is geeky while the latter is sticky and very large in number. School friends, office colleagues and friends you know are very active on Facebook while Twitter is full of professionals, geeks and enthusiasts of a specific topic. They might tolerate your rant but Facebook audience will quickly hide your profile from their news feed, if you bombard them with irrelevant updates every other minute.
In recent times, Twitter has been aggressively pouring new features and trying to shake the dirt and step up a little. They acquired TweetDeck, rolled out an in built photo sharing feature and updated the way links are shortened and shared on any Twitter platform. Now that the cross posting thing is made live on most Twitter profiles, will they go ahead and add the option to automatically share an RSS feed on your Twitter profile? Feedburner has it since ages and every other Twitter user who writes a blog, is happily using Twitterfeed or another RSS to Twitter service for posting updates on Twitter.
Now looking at the path Twitter has crossed, I am very sure they will copy ideas like scheduling tweets and come up with an in house solution shortly.
Without any doubt, these features make the Twitter experience better for everyone but at the same time – these inbuilt enhancements makes life hell for third party app developers. These are the people who had the original idea and they spent their valuable time, money and resources to foster an idea and made it popular in the first place. These are the people who are to some extent, responsible for Twitter’s overwhelming popularity.
Look at TweetDeck, TwitPic, Tweetmeme and the whole bunch of URL shorteners – do you need any more examples? I can smell these features coming one after another because Twitter devs have learned their lesson – keeping things simple isn’t just enough. There is a thing called “Crowd” and if your competition is getting neck high, just copy the stuff that’s already popular and add them one after another.
“Previously, I developed Twitter applications. Now I am a cartoonist”
No comments:
Post a Comment