Post once, flow everywhere or Post everywhere at once. Facebook Places has made this question har...

Post once, flow everywhere or Post everywhere at once. Facebook Places has made this question harder. I really only want to post and check in at one place. But I want these posts to be visible on all the major platforms. One way of doing this is to (say) post on Buzz and then copy the post with a link to Twitter and then onwards to Linkedin and Facebook. But information and particularly location metadata gets lost along the way. And not all the services link to all the other services so things like Foursquare and Gowalla will be left out. Alternatively I could use a combination system like http://check.in to post one check.in and have it copied to all the others. The same approach might be possible in Tweetdeck or Seesmic. This is the "Post everywhere at once" approach. Except again, the developers of these services can't keep up with all the new platforms and their APIs and at least some of the services will get left out.

I'd prefer it if I could post once and then have automation work in the background to copy the post with a link to all the other platforms. Then I have one master copy and visibility. My feeling is that this should probably be Google Buzz. But if I do this, I'm probably not going to see updates from anyone else if they're not also doing the same thing, or their posts end up on the only other platform (Facebook) that I check regularly.

This whole discussion has also ignored the smaller social networking systems such as our own Ecademy. I really should be eating my own dog food and posting first on Ecademy. But that also requires that I program Ecademy to make it possible and I'm unsure of exactly how I should do that. I'm probably going to get pushed into flowing Ecademy status and location updates to Facebook, and importing them, in the same way that we do for Twitter now.

It also ignores the problem that very, very few of these services actually have any web UI for the location part of their service. As a developer I just plain don't understand this. It's really not hard or very much code to do this. We had a Google Maps based system for setting location on Ecademy within a couple of months of the Maps API being available. And we supported html5 geo-location early as well.

@Sam Sethi Right. Some of this stuff works ok, but you lose context when you get to the target platform. Some of the multiple post systems work ok but they don't have enough coverage. Some of the multiple client systems help a bit (eg Tweetdeck), but while you gain multiple coverage, you usually lose something as well.

And virtually none of these options handle location cleanly or at all.

This explosion of services and especially check in services feels like it needs a radical overhaul. At least smtp-pop3 was a common standard. But soon after email appeared we were into the IM wars that are still going on. jabber should have won but it didn't. Now we're into a whole new area of incompatibility, silos and platform competition. And I refuse to accept the answer that facebook just wins.