Home Tip: Gmail Can Be a Social Network Aggregator

Tip: Gmail Can Be a Social Network Aggregator

So we remain split on whether to call it a “social graph,” but one thing I think we can all agree on, is that many of us are suffering from social network overload. Facebook, and MySpace, and LinkedIn, and Twitter, and Digg, and del.icio.us, and… oh my. We each only have so much attention to give and it can be hard to keep up with all our of social networking — especially when our network of friends is spread across a number of duplicate services.

Blogger and PR guy Steve Rubel has a solution: use Gmail. In a post yesterday Steve outlined how to turn Gmail into what he calls a “Social Network Hub” which aggregates activity from friends across multiple networks and even lets him post status messages via email.

Steve focuses on Gmail and Facebook in his post but writes that his tips will generally work with any social network that provides alerts via RSS, SMS, or email, and with basically any email service. He goes over how to receive status updates from Twitter and Facebook via email, how to post status updates via email, how to use filters to create individual records for each of your friends, and even how to weed out your best friends from all the noise.

These are good tips and a nice way to organize much of your social networking activity around a single hub that you already use. Do you have any tips for cutting through the social network overload? Leave your ideas in the comments below.

Photo credit: wiseacre

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