New social media integration in popular Web 2.0 tools

Image via CrunchBase

There has been a flurry of improvements in integrating social media tools lately, which I wanted to tell you about. I’ve tried all of these new features. They all work great and offer a lot of value to users, particularly if you use more than one Web 2.0 tool.

First, if you use Google Alerts, you’ll see that they now support RSS feeds. No more having to clutter up your email inbox with alerts. Instead, you can read them at your leisure in your favorite RSS feed reader. But the RSS feed integration also makes it possible to integrate Google alerts into any application that can read and display the feeds, such as FriendFeed or your blog. Go to the Manage Your Alerts page to switch your alerts from email to RSS.

Second, LinkedIn profiles now support a lot of Web 2.0 tools, including WordPress and SlideShare. I’ve modified my LinkedIn profile to show the latest posts from this blog, for instance. It’s very easy to do; open your profile and click Add Application. These new features give you a lot of options for showing your professional network what you’re doing and helping them learn more about you.

There were some other applications that I haven’t tried but looked to be helpful if you use LinkedIn as a platform for browsing the Web and managing your Web content. For instance, you can create a reading list via Amazon and then get recommendations on similar books based on what your colleagues are reading. You can also monitor twittering about your organization or other keywords. There’s a lot of new stuff to explore, so if you haven’t dropped by LinkedIn lately, I think it’s worth a return visit.

Finally, FriendFeed has introduced backward integration with Twitter, so you can automatically tweet items from your FriendFeed. Fortunately, you can limit it to any one or more of the services in your FriendFeed, so you can choose not to tweet every Delicious bookmark or Netflix addition. But you can tweet your new blog posts, for example, without any extra effort on your part, which is what I am now doing. See this post to learn more.