I’ve been trying to approach social media like content feeds, dividing up the sort of material I like to post into different streams — Facebook for the personal stuff, Twitter for cultural links, my website for my writing and comics, AuthorsGoneWild for my amateur porn videos. But the process has been driving me crazy. Crazier. Trying to decide what should get posted in which feed sometimes makes me feel like I’m suffering from multiple personality disorder. And it seems to me that most people aren’t using multiple social networks — they’re choosing one and largely staying within that one. Especially as most social services — all? — now have ways of subscribing to other services, or have enabled cross-posting. There’s very little duplication of my friends across the various services I use. Which means my Facebook friends aren’t reading my Twitter posts and vice versa. Or they’re all using pseudonyms. Perhaps I have only one reader, stalking me under a community of fake identities. I can only hope I inspire such passion in someone.

So rather than keep trying to divide myself up, I’m going to treat every service as a sort of lifestream. I’m going to publish more or less the same content on each of my services, using my website as the central hub. Yes, it is rather cylonesque. Hopefully the end result will be better than BSG. I assume people will tune in on the platform of their choice, and my job is to offer my posts on as many services as I think make sense. Like those ads at the back of alt-weekly papers. It’s all fairly automated, so it’s not really extra work for me. But if you’re one of the few subscribed to me on multiple services, you may want to pare your feed list. Or subscribe to all my other feeds!

To facilitate this, I have profiles on several services. Use whichever one makes the most sense to you. I do monitor all of them, and I have alerts set up on all of them, so I will respond to comments made on each service. Unless I think you’re spam. In which case, I have already wired the money to your bank account in Liechtenstein. When do the royal jewels arrive?

Here’s the list:

Peterdarbyshire.com. My personal website. Where you’re reading this.

Amplify. I’ve started using this to post to Twitter and Facebook. It has the same openness and ease of use as Twitter, but it’s much more flexible. I’m not actually a fan of Twitter, because I find its character count too restrictive, and it’s almost impossible to follow a conversation. But Twitter hit critical mass first, so everyone’s on it. I hope more people switch to Amplify, because I think it’s better, but only time will tell. It has a great clipping feature too!

Twitter. I mainly use this through Hootsuite to watch my lists. Like I said above, I post through Amplify, although not exclusively.

Facebook. It’s where I tend to put the more personal stuff, because that’s where most of my closest friends and family are. That’ll probably continue, but I’ll monitor it as my friends list grows.

Friendfeed. A good service but little used. It’s good for collecting people’s different life feeds. It doesn’t seem to have caught on, which is too bad.

Tumblr. I’ve created a Tumblr account that’s fed by my website and my other accounts, for those people who like to use Tumblr for easy reposts, etc.

Flickr. Where I store my photos. Mainly random iPhone shots and the like. I post most of them to my website and Twitter anyway, but not all of them. I have Flickr set up to automatically post to Facebook.

Goodreads. My book reviews. My Goodreads account is subscribed to my blog, so you can read most of what I post through Goodreads if you like. I also repost on Goodreads some of the shorts I publish at peterdarbyshire.com.

Fictionaut. A sort of social networking and literary site. I’m new to it, but it’s been a lot of fun so far. I repost the shorts from peterdarbyshire.com here.

If you use a service that I haven’t listed here, then send me a note and I’ll consider setting up a profile on it. Except for Google Buzz. I tried that already and most of the people I knew hated it.