Now that I am fully subscribed into the current online community craze, I thought I’d put some order around it. WordPress, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter could serve pretty much the same purpose in many aspects of social networking. Thus, the burden of making determination on how to use each one of them effectively falls on the user’s shoulders.

So far, it looks like the best way to use each is the following:

• WordPress (this blog) – short articles on technical and non-technical stuff I want to share with the whole world and get feedback.
• Facebook – a glorified mailing list for posting the things I want to share with my English speaking friends.
• Twitter – this place is for self-absorbed cool kids and PR machines. To use it as such, I advertise my blog entries on it with the ‘twitter tools’ plug-in for WordPress.
• LinkedIn – is for keeping track of the work contacts. So, only work-related status updates go there.

I’ve hacked the “Twitter Tools” plug-in for WordPress to append the #fb tag to tweets. This way all tweets from WordPress also show up in Facebook via the “Selective Twitter Status” facebook app. Hence, all three, WordPress, Twitter and Facebook are one-way connected, sending posts from public to private, but not the other way.

So far it covers all my social networking needs. I’ll revisit this post in a year or so to see where the reality went.

UPDATE: Well, I am back this fine 10th of March 2011, almost 17months after and I can say:

• WordPress -  I removed most of the straight technical stuff, but left personal rumblings on near-techno-sphere. Seems like a good fit.
• Facebook – A rare update, sharing something interesting with friends.
• Twitter – I skip this place now. To much unstructured information.
• LinkedIn – keeping it up opportunistically to store work-related status contacts.
• MediaWiki (this site) – new this year. this is where I store all the technical stuff now. It’s ok, not the best though.