I use Google Plus. I admit it. I kind of like it better than facebook. I know - that's weird. But I do. I like the circles - I like being able to use it like twitter and facebook combined.

Since I do use it a bit like twitter, I tend to make my posts public. Not all of them, but many of them. And since I am nearly the only person who uses Plus, I figured I might as well push my public posts to twitter and facebook as well. Why not? And this is where things started to go off the rails.

First off, there's the question of how do I even get things across the platforms? Thanks to the fact that a lot of money rests on which social network 'wins', it's not that easy. I finally found a tool (Rob McGee) that pushes things across. But, of course, if I'm pushing things to twitter, I need some sort of link shortener. And since I also like to know whether anyone is reading what I write, I used one that lets me track clickthroughs - bit.ly.

So now let's review - say I'm reading an article on how other animals are much better dancers than penguins, and I want to share it. My current workflow is: (1) copy the story URL and (2) paste it into the bit.ly box. (3) Copy the shortened URL and (4) post it into the Google Plus status update box. (5) Write something pithy that is less than 140 characters. (6) Add Rob McGee to the post so it will be sent to twitter and facebook, and, finally, (7) hit the post button.

On my phone (and I'm sure I could find a plug-in for my browser), I can hit the menu on my browser and say 'share this to facebook'. Someday I hope - I really hope - I can do the same with all my social networks at once. But I've a sneaky suspicion it's going to get worse before it gets better.

I've actually had thoughts recently of writing a web application whose purpose is to do all of this automatically.  All of the social networks have APIs that should (theoretically) allow this sort of thing.  There are also some aggregator programs, but I don't know how well they do for cross posting.

Yeah - I had thought of doing something like that as well - I make the assumption there must be some reason it can't be done, because I assume everyone wants to do it. Of course, since my comments don't work I guess I should work on them before doing any new programming...