A Facebook Twitter App Feature Request

Twitter: Since I started my twitter profile I’ve posted 800+ updates. I’ve kept this attitude of posting both personal and professional related stuff from the very beginning: from what I am eating right now or doing in my personal life, to what I’m thinking or doing professionally.

To twit, I usually use Yahoo’s Twitter widget by simply pressing F8 and typing an update, sometimes Windows Mobile TinyTwitter, and rarely twitter’s web panel. According to Wikipedia’s article on Twitter, compete.com blog entry ranked twitter as third most-used social network after Facebook and MySpace. And here is a good list of micro-blogging services; there are 200+ twitter-like services world-wide which I reckon twitter is the most famous amongst all. So, I still tend to keep my twitter profile running.

Facebook: At the other hand there is my Facebook profile. Some of you may have already noticed I recently activated my Facebook profile – what an out of date luddite you say, huh?! Why, thank you then!!! When I started my Facebook life, I had this strategy not to live my professional life there and therefore shouldn’t be posting work-related/professional material. Very soon I linked my twitter profile to my facebook so that every single twitter update appears in my Facebook profile too. I like this configuration since it gives me the same convenience of posting twitter updates (from my Laptop, Pocket PC, public computers, …) to my facebook posts. But wait, there are cons as well: I need my professional twitter updates stop coming to my facebook profile. Honestly this is kinda spamming my facebook friends. Maybe, they’re not computer geeks or maybe don’t like to hear anything about software innovations. Why should they be concerned about software innovations which they don’t understand or techniques and tricks which they an’t interested on?!

Any Solution: Well, I cannot double my twitter accounts – one personal and one professional account. Asking why?! Well, after a while I realised there are non-explicit professional posts for which there’s no clear border of their “personal vs. professional” nature; and that, my friends, was just non-stop as I was posting more and more updates. So I decided to keep my single-twitter-profile strategy.

Then I thought maybe a new client application is all I need to selectively (on a per-post basis) publish my updates to twitter, facebook, or both. Yet didn’t find such a thing off the shelf to get rid of this shortcoming. However, I considered a Firefox add-on named FireStatus which seems to do the same but I did NOT like it since it’s only an extension to a browser. It won’t work on my Pocket PC and it’s not even convenient when not surfing the web and hence my browser is not running. Plus, it’s not installed on public computers by default.

Maybe a self-made application is all I need! But NOPE again!!! Because I’m very poor when it comes to time. Besides, I’d probably be reinventing the wheels! I have to develop both Windows NT and Windows Mobile editions, not to mention I’ll need a web interface as well for public computers. No thanks, not a brilliant idea at all!!!

Maybe a new Facebook application to import twitter updates based on a criterion (say a fixed update prefix) works fine. Foretunately, Facebook’s Twitter Application has everything I need except this lacking feature I’m talking about, to filter those twitter posts out before importing to Facebook! I’d say a prefix such as #nofb in twitter updates is enough to workaround this shortcoming. Even then, twitter is more likely to display that frustrating prefix which is not welcome. But I’d probably be okay with that, till I find a trio set of micro-blogging client applications, 1- Windows NT, 2- Windows Mobile, and 3- web-interface become available, everyone of which allows to selectively post updates to twitter, Facebook, or both profiles.

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