Blog of website & interface designer, Darran Morris.

I’ve been looking into ways to connect all of the social media services that I use so that they update each other. There can be so many different profiles now to keep up to date, that it can just take too much time to manually update each of them.

There seems to be plenty of different approaches around, but some just didn’t seem to fit for me. Most of the social apps have open API’s now which should allow connectivity between them all.

The first thing I did was to connect my Twitter to the new Facebook status update. You can do this using this Facebook app by Twitter themselves. So, now I all my tweets appear in my personal Facebook status. 

The next step is to connect the blog with Twitter. This turned out to be really easy too. We use Wordpress here at Poly, and there are a range of plugins which allow you to achieve this. The one I found is called Twitter-tools. It has plenty of options available to create a full two-way integration between your blog and Twitter. Actually, this post will be my first test of how this works.

The final piece of the puzzle is integrating all this with the Poly Facebook page. Facebook have now also updated how Pages work. They are now really similar to user profiles, and are complete with a Wall, photo tab and more. What I would ultimately love, is to connect my twitter feed to the Wall on the Poly page. That would complete this little circle. This blog post from Duct Tape Marketing comes very close to working this out. There is a Facebook app called RSS-Connect which allows you to display an RSS feed on your page in a separate tab and also in a box, but it still doesn’t allow you to stream new entries to the Wall on a page. If I could find a way of getting the posts or the Twitter feed on the Wall, we would be sorted.