Toral: Organizing your online social networks
AS ONLINE social network use grows in the country, various tools have been released to make social networking efficient.
Here are three tools I discovered lately that hopefully can make you productive in maintaining yout social networking accounts.
The first one is Backupify (http://www.backupify.com). This allows you to create a remote backup of your accounts in Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Google Docs, Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress, Gmail, among other services. I use it to back up my Twitter account as this specific service does not keep archives that long.
In order to preserve the information that you shared, having a backup copy of it will be nice for later review and other purposes. Two gigabytes of storage is offered by the service for free.
A lot of us have created social networking accounts but don’t get the chance to login that often to see the latest updates from peers. Even if you do, there is not enough time to scour through all the information posted by friends, family, and contacts. This is where the service of Nutshellmail (http://www.nutshellmail.com) can come in handy. You can configure your account to receive updates once a day (or a week) in one e-mail covering Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn updates.
For Facebook, its update can include birthday celebrants, status and news feed, fan pages and groups update, photo tags, among others. The Twitter part updates you on new followers, quitters, direct messages, replies and latest tweets by friends. If you have grouped your friends, their updates can also be prioritized to arrive in your mail. In my case, this would be the updates of club members, clients, blog team members and family members.
The volume of information is entirely up to you as you can customize the number of updates. What I like about this service is that it reduces the pressure to logon always with the fear of being out of touch with the latest developments from friends. With Nutshellmail, that should be the least of your worries.
Perhaps the most intriguing service I saw recently is Flowtown (http://www.flowtown.com). For a person like me who receives e-mail subscriptions in Yahoo Groups, I often get curious on the face or identity behind the e-mail address. With Flowtown, it will search for information about the e-mail address and give you a glimpse about the profile and online social media or networking activity of the person.
You can also add a webform in your site where new sign-ups will automatically be added as your contact and their online social networking profile linked to. With this info, you will then have the ability to send targeted messages or campaigns and even focus on users based on where they are active. I see a lot of potential with this service. The first 50 contacts are free and every succeeding one has a fee of five cents.
I hope you enjoy the tools I mentioned above as much as I am enjoying these right now.
(http://twitter.com/digitalfilipino)