Well, it’s not so much of a hack… or is it? By definition, it actually is - yet judging from how people like to define “hacking” nowadays, this is pretty lame… but I digress.

The short of it is that I made a “skin” for my Multiply page. The purpose of the exercise is to hopefully set it apart from the rest of the users which go the “template” way. Not that it really matters to me; social networking sites are always secondary to my main site. I’d even go so far as to say the only reason I sign up on such sites is to make sure no one uses my handle. I learned the hard way when someone took the “nargalzius” handle on AIM before me.

It is a good marketing tool however, which is why I’m not stupid enough to dismiss the phenomenon entirely. The flaw in social networking sites is the landscape forever changes. First it was Friendster, then MySpace, then Multiply, and now we’ve got Facebook, Twitter, etc. It’s such a pain in the ass to generate/update content on a social networking site by the fact that once the next best thing comes around, you basically have start from scratch.

This is why the serious pundits/bloggers/companies, etc. have their own websites. They may have accounts in various in whatever flavor-of-the-month-web-fad is out there, but ultimately it all boils down to their main sites.

As such, I have my own blog, my own gallery, my own domain. Whatever “changes” I may do along the way (change blog engines, change gallery engines, add some features), people will still know one and only one ultimate address to go to: www.nargalzius.com which really helps

Leveraging Services

Having said that, I’ve decided that the best balance is to sign up on these services, and find a way to drive the users to my site. The first step is to catch their attention. In the case of Multiply having my own template is immediately noticeable by any heavy Multiply user who’s used to seeing the same “best” templates being used by most of their contacts. Hopefully, they’ll be intrigued enough to deliberately scan the contents of that page.

The next step (assuming the first succeeded) is to very briefly present all the options available to them. You know how everyone nowadays has got A.D.D.¹ (figuratively of course) and having too much junk to read would [ironically] bore them. The goal here is to have the social networking site serve its purpose as a conduit; bridging the population of social networking site x - to personal site y or in my case, www.nargalzius.com

As such, in my “hack” I’ve hidden almost all links to my Multiply accounts’ sub-pages (e.g. blog, gallery, etc) and instead restrict users only to the main page. That main page in turn, has the links and snippets/blurbs connecting to my main site. So they pretty much have no choice but to either exit my page, or be redirected either way to where the real content is - at www.nargalzius.com

I personally don’t think this is misleading the viewer. I made it a point to not put any content on my social networking pages; precisely because I want everything consolidated to my domain² - not anywhere else.

Caveat

One problem I can see is that internet surfers by nature are a very transient lot; and they only act on things when they’re pushed to them. How many people actually take the time to subscribe to an RSS feed? Probably not much. But these same people have no problems with mail being sent their way from social networking site x informing them of new happenings in friend z’s life. These are essentially the same thing. Syndicated content and push email are different methods, but both achieve the same thing of informing a user of updates.

The big difference is that the former requires a deliberate show of interest, whereas the latter is extremely transient; they see the mail, see the link, click it cause they can… but if there wasn’t any notification, I doubt they’d spend the time making rounds to those sites.

So what are the implications of these facts in relation to my hack? By virtue of me not updating content in Multiply itself, the only way people will actually end up viewing my content is if they deliberately visit my site, or if they subscribe to my RSS feed (the huge orange RSS icon) when they first visit my Multiply page.

One good solution would be cross-posting, but again, what’s lacking for my use is that I need this cross-posting capability come from my domain… branching out to the other sites. Ecto is my blogging tool of choice, but unfortunately no one has made a plugin that could give me control of accessing multiple site APIs to accomplish cross-posting.

So the next best thing (and only choice I have at the moment) is hope people know what RSS is, and actually use it - because I did make it extremely accessible in the site; you’d have to be blind to miss it.

What next?

If I have the time, I’d surely want to find out if the other sites could be skinned as well (e.g. Facebook, etc.) I’d like to “brand” my “sites” uniformly, and have them redirect to my domain one way or another.