These are the social networks on which I have accounts.

But I won't be posting directly on any of them.

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I made a big deal out of turning off dlvr.it updates to identi.ca and Twitter. Now I'm ready to turn the service back on. Hashtags are great and all, but what's also great is creating all of my content here and then pushing what I own and control to those services. Notice how these last few posts are short? I want to do more of that.

What good is The Tweeted Times? I'd like a nice output of what I'm posting to Twitter. I don't care much for such a web page from the people I follow. No offense, (you) people. My Tweeted Times would be useful. It appears they don't do that.

I like dlvr.it. It's a refreshingly easy service to work with. For me, it's understandable in a way that ping.fm never was.

So why am I turning it off?

In a word: hashtags.

Postings to Identi.ca and Twitter work better when the proper words are hashtagged (in Twitter) and #hashtagged or !bangtagged (is that the word?) in Identi.ca. And services like dlvr.it don't do that. Nor should they.

So I'm back to manually flogging my blog posts via social networks, hash/bang-tagging where needed.

Dlvr.it was pushing RSS to Identi.ca and Twitter, and since I have the Twitter bridge connected between both services, I was getting one entry in Identi.ca and two in Twitter.

I removed Twitter from dlvr.it, so now dlvr.it updates Identi.ca and Identi.ca updates Twitter.

Problem solved, I think.

I'm constantly looking at situations where a bevy of services like Ping.fm, dlvr.it, Hootsuite, Shoutlet, RSS Graffiti and who knows what else are sending updates to various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca and Diaspora.

And often the social networks themselves are interconnected and exchanging feeds and posts.

It can get confusing.

The primary purpose of this post is to see if I've successfully untangled things for this particular blog.

I've seen writers with substantial followings on services such as Twitter and Google+ declare the open Web dead because they have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers either hard won or quickly garnered on one social network our other.

They may believe in the open Web. But that huge following beckons.

Responding to Rob Reed's Google+ post on the dark side of huge corporate entities -- read: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube -- controlling what we see and don't see on the Internet, I wrote a couple of responses (instead of one because you can't edit an existing post or comment on Google+'s Android client), which I will repeat here because, a) they're not bad and b) I'm against "giving away" content to social networks and c) the irony of us having this discussion about Facebook on the newest, shiniest corporate-created social network, Google+ is particularly rich (and I acknowledge my part in it).

Here is what I wrote:

The whole idea that blogging, the phenomenon, had its year in the sun, and now the idea of regular people writing things on the web is all about Facebook and Twitter, is terrible.

That so many abandon what they're doing for another thing because that other new thing is posited as the solution to all of life's problems speaks to our society's continual fascination with the new.

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I try to automatically send links to my blog entries to all the social networks on which I maintain accounts (the exception being Google +, which I'm still updating manually).

Over the past couple of years, I've had a thicket of services set up to do this. Some work along, others work together. Some social networks themselves will push their entries to other social networks.

It can all be extremely confusing.

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Should I (and should you) have a presence on every damn social network favored by both geeks and civilians?

When a particular uber-geek (I'm thinking about you, @fabsh) leaves one social network (Identi.ca) for another (Google+), do we follow suit? Or just follow. Or not?

I've heard a lot of "well-followed" geek-types comment on how much more quickly they've been "circled" by followers in Google Plus in contrast to their Twitter following and are using the rapid uptake of their Google+ musings as a sign to put more emphasis into the new social network while doing much less with the old (Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook).

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