Managing your Social Network Status Messages using Microsoft Outlook and Windows Live Messenger

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Personal Status Messages (PSM) are an excellent way to keep in touch with your network. Facebook, Windows Live, LinkedIn and other social networks have Personal Status Message features that let you keep your network informed about things you would like them to know. In addition Microblogging tools like Twitter enable you to subscribe to tweets from your network as well as create your own feed.

I spend a fair amount of my day working on email, scheduling meetings and generally working within Microsoft Outlook. As a result, I decided to channel all of my social network updates to Outlook as RSS Feeds. I update my status using Windows Live Messenger and the update is sent to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Live. Here is how I keep up with my updates via Outlook and Windows Live Messenger. I would love to hear ideas of how any of you manage your updates as well.

  • I subscribe to RSS Feeds from Facebook, LinkedIn and any specific Twitter user that I would like to follow. I also on occasion subscribe to Twitter Search Results when something is going on.

   

  • To update all of my social networks at one go I use https://ping.fm and find it extremely useful to update Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and several other networks. To easily update via ping.fm, I have added pingdotfm@live.com as a buddy in my MSN Messenger List. So all I really need to do to send an update is to send an instant message to my Windows Live buddy. I also use a Windows Live Messenger Addin called Twessenger that automatically updates my Windows Live Status message using my Twitter message.

  • In addition to sending status message updates via Windows Live Messenger, I also update my status using email to ping.fm from my mobile device.
  • Another tool that I use to keep track of my (and others) status messages is via the Outlook Calendar. The status messages enable to keep track of what I worked on at specific times using the calendar. To overlay my status messages over my Outlook Calendar, I use an excellent web application called Twistory.  Here is a view of my status messages as seen from my Outlook Calendar:

Feel free to ping me with any ideas or suggestions you may have on managing personal status messages and better ways of doing this.