Solving the Problem of Social Networks With MovableType
While I was at PodCampIreland yesterday in Kilkenny, Ireland, one of the topics that came up several times both in conversations and during sessions was the sheer number of social network sites and services out there now. Someone gave a figure of two being launched per day, but that might have been a bit on the conservative end.
A lot of people, including myself, end up joining these sites to see what they're like. We login once or twice, but lose interest or go back to where we were already.
Of course you'll probably end up using some of them actively, but how can anyone actually find you?
Some of the better organised sites allow you to find your existing contacts easily by name, contacts, email etc., but there's no way to easily see if a user is really active. For example I have an account on Orkut, but I haven't used it in over two years and I probably won't use it anytime soon.
However I do use Flickr, linkedin and a couple of others. Some more actively than others admittedly, but the general point I'm trying to get across is that I want people to find me where I am active not where I'm not.
While most of those sites offer little buttons and badges that you can use on your site / blog a lot of them aren't the prettiest and your sidebar ends up being eaten by an ever growing number of multicoloured and multi-sized badges.
Benjamin Trott's "Elsewhere" plugin offers a graceful solution.
It supports a very large number of social network sites and allows you to add your profile to the ones you are using actively. The end result is the output you can see on the right of this post.
It's simple. It's effective and it probably saves time.
Any of the profiles I've listed are active. I've probably got twice as many (if not more) other profiles, but they're not ones that I'm using on a day to day basis, so why would I publicise them?
Now if only I could just login to them all in one place .........
A lot of people, including myself, end up joining these sites to see what they're like. We login once or twice, but lose interest or go back to where we were already.
Of course you'll probably end up using some of them actively, but how can anyone actually find you?
Some of the better organised sites allow you to find your existing contacts easily by name, contacts, email etc., but there's no way to easily see if a user is really active. For example I have an account on Orkut, but I haven't used it in over two years and I probably won't use it anytime soon.
However I do use Flickr, linkedin and a couple of others. Some more actively than others admittedly, but the general point I'm trying to get across is that I want people to find me where I am active not where I'm not.
While most of those sites offer little buttons and badges that you can use on your site / blog a lot of them aren't the prettiest and your sidebar ends up being eaten by an ever growing number of multicoloured and multi-sized badges.
Benjamin Trott's "Elsewhere" plugin offers a graceful solution.
It supports a very large number of social network sites and allows you to add your profile to the ones you are using actively. The end result is the output you can see on the right of this post.
It's simple. It's effective and it probably saves time.
Any of the profiles I've listed are active. I've probably got twice as many (if not more) other profiles, but they're not ones that I'm using on a day to day basis, so why would I publicise them?
Now if only I could just login to them all in one place .........
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