I’ve been Twitter user for a while, but I must say haven’t been consistent about it since the beginning.  It’s taken me a while to get myself wired to post stuff there.  Add to that the fact that I’m often irritated by the useless drivel that folks tweet and you get something of a picture why I am the way that I am.

In the recent few months, I’ve also begun using Facebook.  To some extent, I find it a bit more engaging than Twitter, for reasons I’m not sure I can articulate.  For some reason, I tend to be more inclined to post stuff there even though the effect is largely the same as Twitter.

Now what I can say about both services is that I’m often frustrated by the character-count limitations they impose.  If you hadn’t noticed, I do sometimes wax verbose and those services just don’t handle my random detours.  That’s where my blog comes in.  You can certainly make the case that if someone wants to bloviate at length on some subject, Facebook and Twitter ain’t the place for it.

To handle this situation in at least a limited fashion, I’ve been using Twitter as a “blog post notifier” tool.  It’s essentially a chain of notification-forwarding.  When I post *anything* to Twitter, my account there is configured to forward the entire post to Facebook.  That’s dandy, but the main thing I’m trying to accomplish is notifying my vast army of followers (not!) that I’ve posted something profound or pithy on my blog.  Wordpress being the excellent tool that it is, provides a Twitter notification function that sends a nice little “new Blog Post…” notice to my Twitter account.  Since all my posts in Twitter arrive in Facebook, I have those two covered. It’s pretty handy and even provides a friendly bit.ly shortened URL to the post.  Slick.

Now the process isn’t bi-directional and that’s a good thing.  I don’t want a new blog post to appear each time I write something in Facebook or Twitter, however it would be nice if I could post something in Facebook and have it show up in Twitter.  There probably is already something that’ll do it for me, but I haven’t taken the time to look.

So, for me Twitter has become a “social media aggregation point”.  I imagine that’s not what those folks originally envisioned but for the moment it works well for me.  Now if I expand my social media outlets, I could be out of luck…and time!