Luckly I have discovered a cool way to integrate your blog and many popular social networks into Google+ very easily. The trick is to use the under appreciated, “post by email” feature found in many social services. Basically the way this works is a social network assigns you an unique email address. Every time you send an email to that address it is automatically posted to your network. This feature is commonly used to integrate mobile devices that can only send text messages. But we are going to use it to tie in Google+.

Post To WordPress From Google+

1. To start off you are going to want to go to Gmail or any free email provider and get an email address. Make sure you make it something that no one would ever guess. Something like 32v4n8o8h@gmail.com. Also while you are there find out the POP3 address of the provider.
2. Next login to your WP dashboard and go to Settings > Writing.
3. Scroll down til you see a Post to Email section that looks like this:
4. 
5. Fill this form out completely including the POP3 address where it says “Mail Server”.
6. Next go to Users > Add New and add a new user with the email that you just created. Make sure that the name and email are the email address and give the user ‘admin’ rights.
7. Because WordPress doesn’t want blogs constantly bombarding mail servers, they require that you load a script to prompt email/post retrieval. You can do this by either having a cron job ping example.com/wp-mail.php or you can include this simple HTML in your theme’s footer.
8. Finally go to Google+ and create a new Circle. You can call it blog, WordPress, or whatever you want. Go to add the email address that you just created and tied to your blog, to the new circle.
9. Now when ever you want to share a Google+ post on your blog as well, just add your “blog” circle to the list of users you are sharing with. Make sure that “Also email 1 person not yet using Google+” is checked, and hit Share.

You can use this technique to tie in more than one blog, you just have to tie in that same email address to all the blogs.

Post To Twitter From Google+

Because Twitter doesn’t provide a post by email feature by default we are going to need the help of Posterous.com.

1. Create an account at Posterous.
2. Under the Auto Post section make sure to tie in your Twitter account.
3. Grab the email address that looks something like yourname@posterous.com
4. Head over to Google+ and create a new circle.
5. Add the email address that you just got from posterous, to the new circle.
6. When ever you want to share a Google+ post on Twitter as well, just add your “Twitter” circle to the list of users you are sharing with. Make sure that “Also email 1 person not yet using Google+” is checked, and hit Share.

The really cool thing about using posterous like this, is that you can incorporate many different networks along with Twitter.

Post To Facebook From Google+

1. Login to Facebook.
2. Go to facebook.com/mobile/
3. Towards the bottom of the screen you will see a section called “Upload via Email”.
4. Copy the email listed is that section. It should look like something@m.facebook.com
5. Head over to Google+ and create a new circle.
6. Add the email address that you just got from Facebook, to the new circle.
7. When ever you want to share a Google+ post on Facebook as well, just add your “Facebook” circle to the list of users you are sharing with. Make sure that “Also email 1 person not yet using Google+” is checked, and hit Share.

If you don’t want to setup a new circle for each network, you can setup one and call it something like, “outside network” or “everyone else”. Anyways, good luck!

The amazing Tony Adam sent me an invite to the private beta of NameSake.com last night, and I will admit, I was planning on being disappointed. Maybe it was my recent troubles with Quora that made me skeptical, but for some reason I wasn’t expecting much.

Boy was I wrong.

NameSake.com is a beautifully crafted social networking site that from the beginning has a warm almost cozy like community going on. Shortly after I got my account active, founder and product development lead, Brian Norgard, welcomed me to the community and even gave me some personalized tips on how to better communicate with other users. Instantly I met other users and engaged them in almost real time conversation.

The UI is probably one of the best aspects of this network, its clean and free of obstacles. As a result it creates a space that is both easy to use and a pleasure to engage in. In an industry that is hell bent on widgets, pokes, and other obnoxious features, NameSake.com is free of all that and strives to create a stress free space to engage, and for that I love it.

However, I do see one tiny problem with the service. I don’t have a reason to use it. Don’t get me wrong, I can see why many folks would use this everyday. But, for me I don’t see getting the same value from it that I do Twitter. And because I am becoming insanely more busy, its highly unlikely I am going to be able to appropriate more time away from things that provide real value.

My three wishes for NameSake.com:

• A sizable amount of my clients start using it, so I can find value in using it too.
• Other social media power houses take a page from NameSake.com’s play book and start building interfaces that are a joy to use.
• All the good Karma that folks like Brian Norgard is spreading, pays off in the end.

When NameSake.com finally launches to the public, be sure to join and connect with me!

I have only posted one question and that will probably be my last. Here’s why: Earlier today I posted: “Is Quora an appropriate place to ask silly questions for comedic value?” I then posted it to Twitter and one of my twitter followers responded. Then a few minutes later I get a status message that says someone has redirected my question to “Is Quora only for ‘serious’ questions?” At first I was thinking, Well that’s cool they are trying to help by pointing out an already existing thread.

But then I realized that no, they are actually 301ing my original question thread! Meaning that if you go to my original question you will now be redirected to another user’s question instead.

So here we have a site that completely thrives off of user submitted content and they think its OK to highjack that content whenever they want.

I know what many of you are thinking, But, Joe, its the same question. They are trying to help. I don’t care if its the same question. Its not the question that I even care about, its the answers. Just because someone else has posted the same question, doesn’t mean we are going to have the same dialog as well.

So why do I think this means the end of Quora? Because, users don’t like to have their conversations high jacked, and Quora killing their own content mill.

Can you imagine a moderator at Twitter redirecting similar tweets from different users, completely derailing their user’s dialog? I was looking forward to continuing my dialog with my twitter follower that posted a question, but that conversation was cut short (or off rather).

If you ask any web entrepreneur what’s the biggest value in question and answer sites they will tell you, content generation. These types of sites churn out very high quality content that works very well in search engines. But, if your content is riddled with 301′s and redirects then you can kiss that value goodbye. I know what you are thinking, what about duplicate content? aren’t they doing the right thing cutting down on duplicate content? This isn’t duplicate content, because it would take nothing less than a miracle for similar questions to create identical answers and dialog!

Which is where the real value is to begin with! In the dialog! Which in my case no longer exist.

The image above is a screen shot of my Twitter. Yep, that’s right, I said “my” Twitter. You see no one else looks at Twitter the same way I do. No one else has the same follower/following formula. Sure many may have the same number of followers, but no one has the same followers and following. This is because no one else is @JoeHall. Social media is full of different humans (and robots) and each one of us experience it in a different way. Each one of us has a different social media reality. So, you have your own Twitter as well.

Long before social media, philosophers have theorized subjective realities as being the basis for conscious behavior. In 1974, Thomas Nagel asked, “What is It Like to Be a Bat?“. Here, Nagel, tells us that because bats are conscious and interact with the world in a completely different way than any other mammal, their reality is unique. However, you don’t need to be a bat to have a subjective reality, each one of us sees the world differently and thus has a different experience.

The study of subjective reality has been nearly impossible given that no one can truly get inside the mind of someone else. Even the movie Being John Malkovich showed us that having access to another person’s reality isn’t enough if you can’t shed your own on the way in.

However, with social media things are a bit different. Now the saying “walk a mile in someone’s shoes” isn’t just a figure of speech. For example, if I wanted to, I could let anyone reading this, log into my Twitter account. While logged in, they could experience what its like to be @JoeHall. Or better yet, one could log into a spam bot’s acct and see what it’s like to be a spam bot. Or you could log into my mom’s email and get a tiny glimpse into her digital reality. By doing so you would have expanded your own reality and would have a much more rounded perception of the digital landscape.

As we work to build digital realities we are also expanding the potential for new experiences and new avenues for exploring those same realities.