Cross-Pollination

I’ve made bold claims in the past about my intentions to not use Facebook. Alas, my stance lasted only four months. I’ve added content to my Facebook page. I don’t feel overly guilty about this, though, for two reasons.

First, I didn’t actually go to Facebook to add that content. I’ve been using Posterous for a while now primarily to share the crazy photos I take with my iPhone. I also occasionally link to some crazy website, or share something I find interesting. I email photos or send links to Posterous, and Posterous posts on my behalf to Twitter. They recently added Facebook, and a slew of other social services, to their autoposting system, so now when I send a crazy photo to Posterous it will be posted to my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Second, I have yet to comment upon anyone else’s posts, like or dislike any posts, or in any other way make use of Facebook.

The question remains, though: why did I enable autoposting to Facebook, given my previous hardline stance against the site in general? I said before “There’s no specific value to me to dilute my online presence by using Facebook.” Well, Posterous allows me to cross-pollinate without diluting my online presence. I don’t need to go to Facebook to add content there. I simply do what I was doing before – sending stuff to Posterous – and it ends up at both places.

While there’s some overlap between the people I interact with on Twitter and the people I’m “friends” with on Facebook, it’s actually a surprisingly small number of people with whom I’m connected at both sites. So using Posterous allows me to remain marginally engaged – or at least visible – to those people who only use Facebook. It’s foolish to think that I could get them all to use Twitter just to stay up to date with me, so using Posterous’ autoposting functionality allows me to meet them in the middle.

I still use Twitter for my day-to-day status updates, and for sharing goofy links, asking and answering questions, etc. I don’t have any intention to change that any time soon, and I still have no intention of using Facebook in what would be considered its “conventional” way. But at least I can share some things with more people, and maybe have a conversation topic the next time I see someone in a face-to-face situation.