These days there are lots of strange, wonderful and wacky ways of sharing a whole range of information about your life. From the mundane “I had Frosties for breakfast” to “I’m in New York and there’s a huge monster going crazy!” there’s a way to do all of it.

It seems at the moment the most popular ways of doing this are Facebook and Twitter. Those two websites have the biggest groups of users, and that’s what makes it all possible. There’s no point posting stuff online if there’s nobody there to see it. The echo noises in Google Buzz are testament to that.

The magic of Twitter and Facebook is that you don’t need to post something on there yourself. There are more methods of posting stuff than there are systems to post to. So you can tell YouTube to announce on Twitter when you’ve uploaded a video. You can get FormSpring to post your answers to question right on your Facebook account. The clever part of these systems is that they follow you around the internet keeping tabs on everything you do and telling the world about it.

Now we face a new kind of problem. Just what service is posting to what service? Where is all this stuff going to? Who makes it show up there? You see, I’ve got a Twitter account and a Facebook account. I want to post to both but I don’t want the trouble of using a separate app to post to each account. It’s much more simple if Twitter will automatically post to Facebook. It does, and I use that system. But the thing is I also want to post the same information to my Facebook Fan Page. Now things get a little sticky. Things get even stickier when I realize that I want Flickr to tell people when I’ve posted new photos, and Google Reader to tell people when I like or share a news store, how is all this going to happen?

Like I said earlier, there are countless systems for doing all these things and the chances are that you’ve figured it out already. I’ll take a look at specific systems later on.

A couple of nights ago I thought it would be an interesting exercise to map out what systems I’m using and how each one interacts with the others. It’s a case of identifying information in and out points. What systems do you use that share information, and which ones do you put information into. Here’s my map.

It’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever tried to put together. Still, I think I got it figured out. Is your map as complicated as this?

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