[UPDATE, January 30, 2010: I think I found a solution. I created an additional notify.me account, so now I can handle two different flows.
(1) Shared reading:
Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipe -> notify.me (1st account) -> Ping.fm -> Twitter, Hi5, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Identi.ca, Plurk
(2) (Other) status updates / microblog posts:
Twitter -> Yahoo! Pipe -> notify.me (2nd account) -> Ping.fm -> LinkedIn, Typepad, Hi5, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Facebook, Identi.ca, Plurk, Tumblr
(3) Posting from any other place (e.g. Skype) to Ping.fm, or from the Ping.fm web UI:
I'm testing now. Hope it will work this way.
Tweet: http://ping.fm/txw1h [UPDATE: solution] Struggling to re-route my microblog posts and shared reading
Okay, method number (3), with the @tt prefix, seems to work. At least it seems to post to Twitter only…]
Twitter's implementation of "reply" and "retweet" functionality inside its web UI is compelling me to set it apart from other social networks that support status updates and microblog posts.
Where I used to input my microblog posts in Ping.fm in order to distribute them to virtually all my accounts on social web services (including Twitter), I now find it a better idea to input on Twitter first, and then have my tweets automatically route to the other services.
Why? Because I want to use Twitter's "reply" and "retweet" buttons whenever an interesting conversation unfolds on Twitter.
Until now, I would type in the @ or RE or RT syntax manually. This involved the same effort whether on the Twitter web UI or on the Ping.fm web UI. So I would usually go to Ping.fm in order to spread my tweet across services.
Twitter now adds useful metadata when e.g. replying to a tweet. Due to that metadata, you can actually see on Twitter to which tweet I was replying. This is very useful. Since that metadata does not travel with my message when I write it on Ping.fm, I am compelled to write every reply on Twitter itself.
One such compelling reason is enough for me to switch from Ping.fm to Twitter.
Current flow:
Ping.fm -> all my accounts on social web services
AND:
Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> notify.me -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts
Desired flow:
Twitter -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (except Twitter)
AND:
Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> (notify.me?) -> Twitter -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (except Twitter)
OR:
Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (including Twitter)
The challenge that I've run into is to do with notify.me. As far as I can tell, I can setup notify.me to post to Ping.fm in one way only: either for Ping.fm to post to Twitter only, or for Ping.fm to post to all my social web accounts (including or excluding Twitter).
I'm wondering if there's a hack, or whether I will need to find another service, similar to notify.me, in order to create a different route.
I've been trying some syntax suggested by Ping.fm in order to specify to which services it should post – by including that syntax into the Yahoo! Pipes feed.
In particular, I've tried to include #T in the Yahoo! Pipe after I had created a posting group "#T" on Ping.fm which included only Twitter. To no effect.
I then tried to include @tt in the Yahoo! Pipe hoping that Ping.fm would post only to Twitter, but none of those posts seem to go through at all. Three of them were picked up by notify.me, but none appeared on my "recent posts" on Ping.fm.
(I do apologize for my messy language here. It's late and I should really be sleeping. But this is bugging me.)
LATER: Right, after I removed "@tt" from the Yahoo! Pipe, my Google Reader shared reading items do seem to go through again.
EVEN LATER: Well, maybe not. But I need to get some sleep now. Let's see how much has gone through by sunrise. In any case, seems like I need to find an additional grab-and-post service like notify.me in order to enable two out of three routes from the desired flow described above.
Schuurmudgeon 