Integration, integration, integration . . .

July 23, 2008 · Posted in Site info . . . · Comment 

The glorious Intersheep is a wonderful place. Full of news, games, tools and, increasingly, people (some of who are also tools obviously!).

The problem, certainly for me, is becoming one of keeping all of these different systems who’s functions overlap to a degree, up to date,

For example I use Facebook (mainly for playing Scrabble and seeing what other people are up to by reading their status messages) and I use Twitter. Now isn’t Twitter basically Facebook with everything bar the status messages taken away? Great, so why update both?

What I want is a way that I can update one place and have everywhere that requires a status message from me updated at the same time. Twitter did have this until they switched the feature off due their much publisised capacity and scaling problems but there are other examples.

I use Google Reader as an RSS newsreader (occasionally checking out bloglines and sometimes switching back for a while) and most sites now have a blogroll, or a list of your favourite sites.  Now my blogroll would pretty much be the list of sites I read using Google Reader but I don’t want to have to go back and update my site’s list of links if I add or remove a site from my list of feeds.  Google has made a step towards this type of integration by allowing you to export you list of feeds as an OPML file and import it.  However this still means I’ll need to reser the list on my WordPress site anytime I change sites in Google reader.

If I find a story in Google Reader I can share it, and after some recent changes I can share a story and add a note to it . . . hmmmmm, sounds like I should be able to automatically add that as a story on my WordPress site doesn’t it??

The list goes on . . . I want to be able to upload pics from my iPhone to my Flickr account, add notes etc to it and have it appear on my site without having to have to build another new story.  I want my status/trophy list from my PSN account to be available on my site automatically and while I’m here I’d like the moon on a stick please 😉

These things are coming but they’re not there quite yet . . . quite how close things are I hope to find out over the next  few days/weeks as I play with this new site and, if things go well, start blogging from all over the place.