shahine.com/omar/

The thing that really drew me to Twitter was that it allowed me to use one service to both update my Twitter status and my Facebook status (via the Twitter Facebook applications).

However, what I’ve found is that I have a different audience on Twitter and Facebook. My Tweets tend to be more “geeky” than my Facebook friends probably understand. Also they are probably to “frequent”. Why are they too frequent? Well I post to twitter a few times a day and to Facebook once a day max.

Over time I’ve started to treat twitter more and more like a “Microblog”. That is I post small snippets of things that I consider more like a blog and less like a “Status Update”.

I view “Status Update” like

“Going to Seattle tomorrow”

and a Microblog post like

“11% of online adults use Twitter or update their status online. http://bit.ly/GFVqN”

So, a few weeks ago I decided to “break the link” between Twitter and Facebook. I was able to do this using a service called Ping.fm.

Ping.fm is a universal update status service. It allows you to add status update and microblog services and then chose where your updates go.

In my case I have defined the following:

if you look at the table above you can see how I’ve defined each service. Ping.fm has a notion of a Default trigger as well as a Status update and Micro blog post.

When I just post to Ping.fm without specifying a trigger, it will go to both Facebook and Twitter. When I post using a Micro-blog trigger it only goes to Twitter.

Here is a pretty picture.

So now I have one place to go where I can post to both services, or I can just post to Twitter separately and only have it go to twitter. In other words I use Ping.fm to replace the functionality I had where all services got updated at once without tying Twitter to Facebook.

When you use SMS to post to Ping.fm you can use triggers to route your posts. For example you would preface your post with “@s” to post a status update

• @s – status update
• @m – microblog
• @fb – just post to Facebook

The last thing I will note is that I aggregate my Twitter updates to FriendFeed but not my Facebook status.

Not every app supports Ping.fm yet but here are a few that do:

1. Nambu for the iPhone (Twitter, Ping.fm and FriendFeed app)
2. AlertThingy – Adobe Air multi headed client for Twitter, Facebook, etc
3. twitterfeed – will post your blog updates to Ping.fm
4. twhirl – another Adobe Air multi headed client
5. i.ping.fm – iPhone formatted page.

This system gives me a lot more control and lets me use Twitter to have geekier conversations and Facebook to have the kinds of conversations my friends and family would understand and want to participate in.