The Buzz Bin

By Jenn Riggle

Photo courtesy of antaldaniel

Like the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, we’re seeing the barriers between the different social media platforms begin to topple. I guess this isn’t surprising, as we see social media become more and more a part of our every day lives.

The good news is that this makes it easier to maintain your different social media accounts and integrate their information. The bad news is that it’s also easier to maintain your various social media personalities and become a “Social Media Sybil” (okay, I’m really dating myself here).

Probably the example that we’re all most familiar with is TweetDeck, which allows people to simultaneously update their Facebook and Twitter status or view Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace updates from a single dashboard. By the same token, LinkedIn has shown a blending of platforms, recently adding Twitter feeds to its profiles. I always felt that in many ways, LinkedIn was a network of resumes. By adding Twitter feeds, profiles become much more dynamic and you really get a sense of what people are like by seeing what they’re reading (through links) and saying online. By the same token, since finding a job is a lot like dating, online dating services like eHarmony should consider adding Twitter feeds to their profiles as well.

But probably the thing that hammered this idea home for me was that job search sites like Simply Hired released new features that expand its integration with social networks liked LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. This makes it easier for people to connect with recruiters and hiring managers online. It also offers a “Share” feature that allows you to share job listings with friends on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – as well as through e-mail. This can help you determine if you know anyone who works at that company and enlist their help to get you an interview.

Meanwhile, Facebook is positioning itself to become your online identity through Facebook Connect, which allows you to access multiple Web sites with your Facebook information. More than 60 million people use Facebook Connect to access Web sites every month, many without even knowing it. And you can find it almost anywhere, including thousands of news sites, social media services, and now, even MySpace. Not to be outdone, rumor has it that Twitter is developing a “Twitter Connect” service that will allow you to sign on to other sites with your Twitter information, pull data and then publish it on Twitter.

But it would appear that the real game changer here is Posterous, which allows you to post things online using e-mail. For example you can e-mail a video to Posterous and it can simultaneously post it to your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, blog site and YouTube accounts.  Mashable recently did a comparison of Tumblr and Posterous and ranked the latter as setting the bar for ease of integration and “rolling out features faster than humanly possible.”

Would love to hear your thoughts about how this convergence is impacting you. But one thing is for certain, this is only the beginning and we’ll continue to see more social media integration as people try to be everywhere at once.