• by brandon , May 16, 2008

As a follow-up to David’s post about the instant messaging and social networking software Digsby, I thought I would provide another solution I've found for IM-to-Web status updates.

Digsby does sound like a piece of software that will make the IM and social networking game a bit more efficient for regular users, especially for the current era of mini-blogging and status updates. More specifically, Twitter functionality is what I am thinking about when it comes to these technologies.

However, if you aren't interested in using Digsby to accomplish the update functionalities, there are other ways to use IM to update your Twitter status and, in turn, publish the information on other sources throughout the Web via our friend RSS.

I’m a big fan of Facebook’s ever-expanding plethora of Web 2.0 capabilities. Here is the chain of information sharing that occurs when I want to update my Twitter status efficiently in a means that also allows it to publish seamlessly on my web site at http://www.webolia.com.

What I have done is set up an instant messaging program with Twitter and also Twitter with RSS feeds.

I signed up for an account at Twitter. Within Twitter, I turned on the functionality for it to be updated via instant message. I added twitter@twitter.com to my instant messenger account.

I then logged into my Facebook account and added a Twitter-synchronization application to my Facebook profile. This Facebook application pulls data from the Twitter RSS feed and displays it as my Facebook status.

To publish the status on my web site(s) I utilize the updates RSS feed from my Facebook account and integrate into my web site.

The status update that I display on http://www.webolia.com may appear as a bit of an “easter egg.” It is located as the first headline on the “industry news” block on the right side of the page. Check it out to see how it looks.

So, when I want to update my Twitter mini-blog, Facebook status, and status on my web site, I send an instant message, which takes about 2-4 seconds total.

Setting up the entire process could take about 5 to 30 minutes, depending on your web savvy, but it is a solution that I have found to be quite efficient for easily updating multiple social networking sources.