Princess Polymath

Like many of you, I have a Twitter account, a LinkedIn account, a Facebook account, and I have my tweets go to LinkedIn and Facebook so that I can lazily update everyone when I have something to say.  The resulting stream ends up being pretty spammy and unfocused, and so I post much less frequently than I might.  My “regular” friends feel like I’m super spammy, and my “geeky” friends complain they never hear from me.  This is exactly the kind of problem that G+ circles should be able to solve.

For this reason, and also because I love mashing stuff up, I can’t wait until G+ releases their APIs.  I want to build (or use) integrations with other systems so I don’t spend all my life bouncing from social network to social network – or pretending to engage in them by tossing messages over from other systems.

I’d love to have a LinkedIn circle, a Twitter circle, and a Facebook circle, so when I share something that I intend for my LinkedIn audience I can just add them and it’ll appear in my LinkedIn stream.   Now that I have G+ I don’t spend much time at all on Facebook (although I do on LinkedIn) and I feel a little guilty .  G+ could add this integration themselves, or third party developers (like me) could create applications that do the shuttling from place to place.  I’d love to have one place to keep my stream – and decide what other streams should get any given update.  This would make me much more likely to participate actively, because I could protect my less-geeky friends from seeing updates about semantic web visualizations.  And honestly, it’ll be a long time before everyone I know is on G+ (if ever) so I do want to make sure my Farmville-addicted friends see my updates too.

I’d also love to see incoming integration.  For instance, Runkeeper integration would totally rock.  It already takes input from my FitBit, so everything’s in RunKeeper, so I could send those updates to my Fitness circle of people-who-actually-care-about-my-training.  My Runkeeper updates go to Facebook, but again, it’s kind of spammy.  I’m generally more ok with dumping everything to Facebook because the stream is so noisy to begin with, but I’d really rather target those messages to folks who have an interest in hearing about it.

So, G+, can we have some APIs soon?

Sharing this on G+ with Friends, APIs

Tagging here as Geek Stuff, Google +, API

Inspired by my coworkers, I’m going to participate in the 30 Day Blog Fitness Challenge.  In contemplating it, though, I want to add a little bit of extra interest for myself, and remind myself of the value of taxonomy and categorization.  I used to post about all sorts of things, and I find that I stick to work-related things mostly.  Why? I don’t know.  I mean, there are categories. I can use them.  People can find what they need!  But recently I’ve become super lazy and avoided any sort of tagging, just tossing things willy nilly onto the blog, and focusing mostly on work related topics.  Add to this the fact that I’ve just joined Google+ and I find myself categorizing my people into circles which I’m not exactly confident about.  Are they the right circles?  Do I need more (or less)?  Am I ever going to send messages to that group?

So not only am I going to post every day for 30 days (or more), I’m going to put meaningful categories on the blog posts.  And then I’m going to post to (and list) the Google+ Circles I’m sharing that post with.  This should actually help me get better at creating and maintaining meaningful circles for the things I want to talk about.  Fitness, entertainment, work, open source, philosophy… there is space for all of this and more in my thoughts and in my blog, but if I am talking to a specific set of people I’ve identified in Google+ as interested in the topic it may help focus the message and make it more compelling and engaging.  Otherwise I seem to soften it a bit for the general masses.

So prepare for 30 days of posts about… whatever.  Adventure racing.  Google Plus itself.  The Semantic Web.  Food.  I’ll tell you what the names of the circles I’m sharing them with are.  And they’ll be internally categorized reasonably on the blog.

Anyone else want to join me on this?  I think this will be an excellent test of those circles we’ve been making.  Are there topics that are appropriate for one or two of your circles? If not, maybe you need to adjust them?  What is the purpose of circles unless they help you target specific conversations to the right people?

This post be sent as public on G+.  It’s not a copout.  Seriously