The number of social sites online is staggering. Some people choose one site and stick with it. A majority of us tend to pick a handful (or all) of them. It can be time-consuming to post updates to more than one site, especially if you plan to send the same content to multiple sites.
Fortunately, there are tools available that make it easy to send one update to multiple sites. Ping.fm and Tarpipe are two such sites that I’ve used on a regular basis. Ping.fm is easy to use and supports a lot of sites, but offers little customization. Tarpipe however, offers integration with almost as many sites, but also offers a level of customization similar to Yahoo!Pipes. The benefit of this is that you can update more than just a status or blog (text). You can also use the Tarpipe service to update pictures to more than one service.
Want to setup your own Tarpipe workflow? Read on …
Sign up for a Tarpipe account
Visit the Tarpipe sign up page to get an account.
Connect Tarpipe to your other sites
Click on the accounts tab and enter your credentials for the sites to which you want Tarpipe to connect.
Create your workflow(s)
Click on the workflows tab and click “create a new workflow”.
Enter a title and description in the properties section. This will help keep your workflows organized as you start making more and more workflows.
Choose which connectors to use in the connectors section. I use the “MailDecoder” connector to process incoming emails. If you’re a fancy-schmancy developer (which I sometimes claim to be), you could use the “RestDecoder” and use the Tarpipe API and roll your own updater. Since we’re not going into that level of detail here, click on “MailDecoder” to add that connector. Then, click on one or more external site connectors (Twitter, Facebook, etc) to add connectors for whichever sites you wish to update. Think of the “MailDecoder” connector as your starting point; this is the connector that will process the email you send and push different properties to other connectors (or sites).
With your connectors in place, click on a connector property (“subject” on the MailDecoder connector, for example) and draw a line to another connector property (“title” on the TwitterUpdater connector, for example). Continue to connect properties to properties until your workflow represents what properties you want sent where. See below for diagrams of my workflows.
This is my workflow for updating statuses. You can see that the subject line of my email will get sent to Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed.
This is my workflow for updating pictures. If you follow the lines, you can see that the subject of the email becomes the title in Flickr, the photo caption in Facebook, and the status in Twitter. The picture itself gets uploaded to both Flickr and Facebook, and the URL from Flickr gets sent as a link to Twitter. I have a Plurk connector in place, but don’t send anything to it anymore … I’ve found that two sites to keep up on is my sweet spot.
Once your workflow is setup how you want it, click “Save”. To make it convenient, you might want to create a contact with your specialized email address (don’t hand that out unless you want people updating for you).
Ta-da! That’s basically all there is to it. Hopefully, in future Tarpipe updates, they’ll add more services and more functions. One I’d particularly like to see is the ability to inject strings … in case I want to add something like “sent via Tarpipe” or even just a random link.
If this inspires you to setup a Tarpipe workflow, or you know of an alternate (or better) way to do this, please let me know in the comments!
