5 steps to get your blog entries on Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz all at once, using only your WordPress blog

Everyone knows that Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz are powerful ways to direct people’s attention toward lovely artifacts of interestingness on the Web. Yet what person of Internetly grace has the time to update all three along with his or her most delicious of blogs? Sure, in an ideal world you would write entries aesthetically and micro-culturally optimized for each service, but the following five steps will allow a single post to your blog to be elegantly propagated through these important hubs of your online social network.

1) You’ll need WordPress running your blog; this method won’t work unless you host your own.

2) To send posts to your Facebook account, you’ll need Wordbook.

3) To send posts to your Twitter account, you’ll need Status Updater. (I think I had problems using this with Facebook, thus the usage of Wordbook, even though Status Updater has a Facebook option.)

4) Sending posts to Google Buzz is a bit of a hack. Before you proceed, note that this works well only if you do not initially post using Google Buzz. Everything must run through your blog.

4a) First, you will need to connect your Buzz account to your Twitter account, which can be done after clicking on your Buzz link in Gmail, then clicking on “Connected Sites.” Fill in the necessary info and save.

4b) For this work properly, you need to make your Google profile into a username URL. To do this, go to your profile editing page, and scroll down to the “Profile URL” section. Follow the instructions there. Warning: This can cause your Gmail address to become publicly available. If this is a concern, go ahead and change it back to a numerical profile URL after you have completed the integration of Buzz Can Tweet with your Twitter account. I don’t know if a username URL’s brief existence will cause privacy problems later. I suppose that’s a risk you’ll have to take.

4c) Then you will need to sign up with Buzz Can Tweet. What this Web service normally does is send your Buzz entries to Twitter, but it has a bug in it that will eventually post Twitter entries received from Buzz back to Buzz, thus doubling your entries on Buzz — if you were posting initially through Buzz. But with my method, you post only through your blog, so it avoids this bug.

4d) Go to your Twitter account “Connections” (in Settings) and make sure Buzz Can Tweet is allowed to connect to your Twitter profile.

4e) Remember, if you don’t want your Gmail address to be publicly discoverable, don’t forget to change your profile URL back to a numerical value on your profile editing page.

5) Start your mad gathering and sharing of Web treasures and ponderous thoughts.

To recap  how this works:

  1. I post an entry on my blog (often using QuickPost).
  2. That entry gets posted on Facebook with Wordbook, and on Twitter with Status Updater.
  3. Then Buzz Can Tweet sends the Twitter update to my Buzz account.
  4. Voilà: Four networks updated in one step.

Of course, there is something to be said for being selective about how and how often you update each service. This method unfortunately does not gracefully account for that, so beware the adjective “spammy” being attached to your online activities. There also may be some significant lag time between a post showing up on your Twitter account and showing up in your Buzz feed. Finally, Buzz Can Tweet or Google may modify their services to eliminate the Buzz Can Tweet bug that enables this to work. Well, you know, chaos reigns.

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