With all of the social networks that exist today, who has time to keep them all up to date AND actually be social (as in real face time…like in those Dentyne commercials)?
There’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster, as well as other sites who’s main purpose isn’t the social aspect, but still has social things built in such as YouTube and Flickr. Did I miss any?
So, how do you keep all of these services up to date easily? And more importantly, how do you keep up with all of your friends, many of which use more than one of these services?
With the rise of social networks sites, a bunch of social network managment tools have started to pop up. First on the list are sites that will help you update your status on multiple social networks all at once. Tarpipe is a site that lets you create multiple workflows, and each workflow can update one or more of your social network accounts at once. You can send updates to Tarpipe via email, or through their RESTful api. In fact, I have recently created a WordPress plugin that will send new blog posts directly to Tarpipe, which you can then use to update your status on Facebook or Twitter. You can even use Tarpipe to rate beer (and I love beer)! Another site that lets you update multiple social network accounts at once is Quub. As Mashable writes, it is focused towards the “status update impaired or social network newbie” and tries to make things as easy as possible, whereas Tarpipe goes the route of harder to use but more functionality.
As for how do you keep up to date on all of your friends all at once? I don’t have a good answer for that. The best I could find was TweetDeck and FriendFeed. TweetDeck is a desktop application that you can use to keep up to date with Twitter and Facebook friends, but it doesn’t do any other social networks. FriendFeed seems to be more powerful than TweetDeck, but I have no experience with it at the moment, so I can’t comment personally…but it’s created by ex-Google employees so it HAS to be good. 
However, in order to use it, you need to create another account on yet another social network site (granted, you can reuse your Twitter, Facebook, or Google Account if you have one).
I’m sure I’m missing something, and if I have then leave a comment! I am always looking for better ways to do things. 