Eating That Elephant

In my ongoing saga of constantly feeling a tad bit behind with technology and yet wanting it to be super efficient, I didn’t want to have to check my Facebook page all the time.  I wanted it to *tell* me about my friend’s status updates.  So here is what I did.

First, I have a twitter account, and I installed twhirl so that my friend’s twitter updates pop up on my screen – discreetly – and then go away.  I can easily take a look at what happened while I was gone by opening a window.

But then everyone moved to Facebook and I felt boring because I was never updating my status or whatever it is called.   So, first, I made it so my twitter updates would show up on Facebook by adding a simple Facebook application: http://apps.facebook.com/twitter

Next I wanted to see my friend’s updates….so I followed these instructions, which unfortunately had a few glitches.  First, they reference the “minifeed” in facebook which no longer exists.    So instead, you’ll want to follow Facebook’s new instructions for generating your feeds.    Second, they say to use your main twitter ID to post your own Facebook updates to your twitter feed.  Apparently with the new Facebook feeds, there is a lot more data there, and everything on your wall, or at least way too much (e.g., “SoandSo has accepted your friend request”) was getting posted to my twitter stream which was annoying.   So, I routed all of that through my “dummy” twitter account which means that my twitter friends won’t see it all, just me.

Then, to post any status updates I type into Facebook as twitter updates, I used http://fb2twitter.com/ .

So now that you are all lost – here is the end result:

– I can post from twitter, twhirl, Facebook, and even Jott (now that is a complete ‘nother story) and it updates both twitter and Facebook; plus, I don’t have to go to Facebook to see all my friend’s updates – they show up on my desktop.  (I’m too cheap and too old I suppose, to have them show up as text messages on my cell 🙂