2011-09-09

Google+, Twitter and Facebook: all in one post

I'm not a prolific tweeter, my Google+ stream is more of a trickle (no age jokes please!) and I seem to have hit the wall on updating my Facebook status.

But each to their own: different people like consuming network updates through different tools.  So when I do feel like sharing something publicly it seems to make sense to update all three at the same time.

And now I can.

I've been using the Twitter application for Facebook for a while now but until the recent round of privacy updates in Facebook twitter posts were treated the same as wall posts from other friends, even though I had specifically linked my twitter account.  Now there's a new privacy option for integrations like this:



I've started a bit cautiously so if you really want to see my tweets in Facebook you'll have to be my friend first.  However, I have worked hard at setting up friend lists and associated permissions to simulate something a bit more like the circles that are so easy to set up on Google+ so you won't have to read about what my family and (other) friends are having for breakfast.

Which brings me to the second piece in the puzzle.  How to get public posts from my Google+ stream into twitter (and onwards into Facebook as above).

For this I'm using ManageFlitter.  This tool promises to take my public posts from Google+ (and only my public posts!) and repost them to twitter.  They say it might be a bit slow but that isn't going to be a problem for me I don't think and, anyway, when I tested it it seemed to update within the margin of error on a typical twitter refresh.



The icing on the cake is a Chrome extension (also available for Firefox I believe) which allows you to view your twitter streams right inside the Google+ interface.


The extension is called Google+Tweet.  I discovered this through the power of +1, for me this was the first time I'd done a Google search and found that one of the results was tagged with the face of someone I recognised (which I think means someone who is also in one of my Google+ circles).  A nice reminder that the way we use the web is still changing rapidly.



1 comment:

  1. Important: I no longer recommend using Google+ Tweet, it is a source of annoying and hard to remove adware. For more information see one of the replies to this thread: https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/customsearch/tlTcNc5JpCQ

    This does not affect the main use case here which is a single unified post to Goolge+, Twitter and Facebook. However, Facebook's new privacy settings on status updates coming from Apps make it harder to force these postings to appear publicly, though it can be done if you are prepared to risk other apps posting publicly too.

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