SGnTN Casey Fleser / Some Geek in TN

It’s pretty simple to let Twitter set your Facebook status, so why not just do that instead? I tried that for a time and, in my case, many of my Twitter followers are more tech savvy than some of my friends and family that use Facebook, and so some of the, geekier topics let’s say, aren’t going to be of any interest to many of them. And those that would be interested are likely on Twitter anyway. Also some tweets are part of a conversation or a reply. A Facebook status that reads “Casey is @ccgus 5 years from now you’re going to look back on that tweet and laugh.” doesn’t make any sense to the non-Twitter crowd. On the other hand most of my Facebook status updates are general enough that they may be of interest to both crowds. But the real impetus for adding my Facebook status updates to Twitter was a situation I encountered while working up a blog post yesterday.

So yesterday I was writing about bailouts, stimulus packages, and such and I knew I had tweeted something about the bailout back during the election, but I could not find it. I came to conclusion that I must have instead posted it as status update on Facebook. Fine, should be a simple thing to look through all my old Facebook status messages and see what I said. And then I actually tried to find my old status messages. Ha! The only way to do this it seems is to go to your profile and then keep clicking Show More Posts and eventually, hopefully, you’ll find what you’re looking for. But probably not. Compare this to Twitter. Say I wanted to go through all my old tweets where I talked about the iPhone. I can pretty easily page though all my old tweets or I can even try googling iphone site:twitter.com/somegeekintn and I have a nice list of every time I ever tweeted about the iPhone. You can also use Twitter’s Advanced Search, though it is still a bit rough around the edges. But there’s no way to do this with Facebook updates.

So, while not a perfect solution, the best solution is to echo my Facebook updates to Twitter and there they will be preserved for all time, or at least until Twitter runs out of money. I was going to make a post describing just how to do this, because initially the only instructions I was able to find were for the “old” Facebook, but eventually I stumbled across this very thorough explanation. I might add just a couple of other suggestions. First, that post lists the Facebook minifeed as http://www.new.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11 and while this may continue to work, the transition to the new Facebook is complete and so http://www.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11 is probably a safer bet. He also suggests adding a prefix to these forwarded updates which is probably fine, but keep in mind you only have 140 precious characters available for use on Twitter. So I’ll not be adding a prefix. It should be obvious that tweets beginning with “Casey is”, or something similar, originate from Facebook.