Networking the Social Networks (attempting to anyway)

Years ago, those of us here involved with SongShow Plus understood the value of social networking, which was a fundamental reason for the deployment of SSPlash.com, the community for SongShow Plus users. At ssplash.com, you can register as a user, then participate in the variety of discussions that take place within the SSPlash forums. You can also subscribe to email notifications to any posts to these forums as well as the RSS feed for the SSPin forums.

Apparently, however, this isn't enough. Nooo. To be really in with the current social networking trends, we need to have a presence on Twitter. So I'm told. So I registered a Twitter account for SSPlash. Its www.twitter.com/ssplash.

Now anytime we post something within the SSPin forums on SSPlash.com, I go to Twitter and post a link there as well. This, however, soon became tedious. It obviously requires an additional step for each post to SSPin. What is more aggravating, however, is that Twitter has a restriction of 140 characters per post. This makes it difficult to add certain posts because the size of text plus URL often exceeds 140.

So what to do. Bing! An idea.

The FriendFeed service can be set up to monitor an RSS feed, post updates from the RSS feed to its own feed, and then publish that post to Twitter. Even better, FriendFeed can handle text and URL that sizes that exceed 140 characters and will automatically shorten the URL when necessary (something Twitter should do, but doesn't).

Great. So I created a FriendFeed account for SSPlash (www.friendfeed.com/ssplash, then set that account to monitor any activity in the SSPin section of the forum, and then set it to publish any posts to the SSPlash twitter account (www.twitter.com/ssplash).

Sign, it doesn't work. FriendFeed does pick up the posts to the SSPin section of the forum, but the Twitter account does not get updated.

What's weird, though, is that I did the exact same thing with my own personal FriendFeed/Twitter connection, which does work. I have a FriendFeed account, www.FriendFeed.com/douglasjreece that monitors the ssplash.com blog and douglasjreece.com. When FriendFeed detects updates, it enters then into its own feed, then publishes them to the www.twitter.com/douglasjreece twitter account.

This does work. But the same configuration does not work for the ssplash account. For some reason, the connection between FriendFeed and Twitter for the ssplash accounts is not working.

My guess is that attempting to get technical support will cause both services to point fingers at each other -- no help there.

However, my suspicion is that the problem is with Twitter. Why? Because the ssplash Twitter account acts a bit odd. As an example: Go to Twitter.com. You'll see a search screen. Enter "douglasjreece" and press enter. Doing this, you'll find my Twitter account. Works as expected. Now go back and enter "ssplash". You'll find that you get no results. Odd, since there is a www.twitter.com/ssplash account. It appears there is a problem with Twitter which is why I suspect that the FriendFeed/Twitter connection problem is on Twitter’s end.

If anyone can offer some insight into the problem, please chime in.

(BE211)

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