Tech Geek

This week I received the following question: Have you figured out how to have Twitter actually change the status on a Facebook page? Yes, I have. That was an easy one to answer. I suppose the questioner wanted a bit more information than that. I use a combination of Google Talk (Instant Messaging ), Jott, Twitter, and Facebook to keep my friends and youth updated.

The first key is getting your status updates into Twitter. There are a myriad of to do this. There are at least these methods:

• from and SMS message on your phone
• from IM
  
• from your logged-in home page (on Twitter)
  
• from m.twitter.com (via your phone)
• from Jott (via your phone)
  
• from a large number of third party applications at http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps - be warned, there are a lot of them!

Once you've got your updates to Twitter, you need a way to synchronize them to Facebook (and other places). The application that I've been using successfully to do this for the past few months is called TwitterSync. Once you update your Tweet, it magically updates your Facebook status in a minute or so. You can use any verb you want, not just "is" and you can even keep your Tweets password-protected if you don't want the general public to follow you. It automatically filters out side chatter (@ messages on Twitter) and you can also set it to filter out and exclude Tweets that have certain words in them.

In order to set it up, visit http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=6009973148&ref=s and follow the instructions there. Basically, you need to add the application to your Facebook account and also set up your Twitter account to have cnySrettiwT follow you. Once you do this, it seems to work pretty reliably, but some users have noticed times it doesn't update.

I'll also remind you again of Jott as a great service for those of us who don't have the SMS typing skills down as well as most of our kids. Once you sign up for an account, you can send messages to a wide variety of web services. Jott transcribes the voice message into a text message and send it on. You can send Tweets, add Google Calendar appointments, add Remember the Milk tasks, and a whole bunch of other things too.

Next week I'll spend some time on how to put your Facebook Status, and other messenger status, on your blog or webpage.