social media – Page 5 – Just thoughts

My work life all of a sudden took a different direction yesterday, and I’m really excited about it. With the arrival of a new IT Director the opportunity had already presented itself for me to increase the amount of time I spent on strategy and engagement and reduce the amount of time I spent on front-line services.In my new role I will be charged with …

– Further development and communication internally and externally of our strategy; doing this in ways that continue to facilitate the overall cohesion of the Directorate and the quality of our co-working with Schools and other Directorates.

– Fostering new ways of working in the University that exploit both MW E and the ‘web 2.0’ world more generally.

– Communicating the value of the Directorate and the benefits of the Directorate’s work University-wide.

– Further developing our external contacts with other institutions, benchmarking us against other HEI’s nationally and internationally, spotting good practice for us to draw on and building positive mutually beneficial alliances with other organisations across the world.

… now that’s exciting enough, but yesterday it got even better.

I’ve been asked to become the Senior Advisor to JISC on Access Management, details still to be worked out but it’s likely to be a partial secondment; It’s SO complementary to my new role in the University. What’s so important about Access and Identity Management is the role it should play in the transformational change agenda of Universities and elsewhere in the public sector. Identity Management should be at the heart of an institution’s e-Infrastructure. When coupled with access management and membership of the UK Federation, it forms the virtual glue that enables the physical network infrastructure to deliver services and resources seamlessly and transparently to users through portals and single sign-on. So to be associated with something as important as this, you can see why I’m so excited.

Taking the opportunity of an earlier than expected Sunday morning at the keyboard, I started Flock (now upgraded to v.2 – it uses the Firefox v.3.0.4 codebase) and looked at the tabs that opened. What a collection! All of them demand reviewing, reading and some of them even require active updating! It seems I’ve swapped email hell for a different kind of purgatory.

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon ident.ca and it’s neat way of updating both itself and twitter from Googletalk (or any other Jabber service). I liked that – thanks to @andypiper for his tweet. However it got me to thinking. What do I use all the social networks I subscribe to for, and how best should I integrate or maintain them?

I then recalled another tweet from Rob Scoble (@scobleizer) which advocated the use of Friendfeed over Twitter as being a good place to comment upon micro-blog posts, but also as a postbox for updating other social networks from.

Now I abandoned Facebook quite a while ago, but a lot of people I know – haven’t and I’ve been neglecting Facebook updates because it was such a slog to do so. After all I was already updating my location via Brightkite/MyLoki, my twitterverse, and occasionally was remembering to update LinkedIn (the one I think I DO need to give a bit more attention to). So should I switch back the feed from twitter to update my status? No – I didn’t like the way that it would display many tweets that were irrelevant. However, thanks to looking at Brian Kelly’s profile on Facebook I could see that Friendfeed, by posting to Wall rather than Update, would create a stream of activity that my Facebook “friends” could see whilst leaving my “status” blank.

What’s more, because Friendfeed’s an aggregator, everything else in my social networking world would appear there too. So, my conclusion … Facebook and Friendfeed are both aggregators for the two main social networks I am part of. They have different purposes and for me serve separate communities – generally related to work and leisure, but at least I can now keep the Facebook friends a bit more updated of what I’m up to – if they’re interested. If they don’t want the bombardment – they can modify their settings, or “de-friend” me; I won’t be offended.

As for a client for updating social networks, I’ve just about settled on TwitterBerry from the BlackBerry, Flock (with twitter/brightkite) from the web, twirhl or TweetDeck from my PC (I do like Adobe Air) and GTalk from IM. I’ve decided NOT to use SMS – nothing I have to say is THAT important that I want to pay extra to say it!