On FreelanceSwitch Muhammad Saleem is giving some great tips on how to use social media tools, but not get overwhelmed in the process.

I’ve been meaning to write this post since part 1, but then came part 2, and today part 3:

• Social Media and Simplicity, Part 1: Reduce
• Social Media and Simplicity, Part 2: Organize
• Social Media and Simplicity, Part 3: Time

Here is the essential part thus far: don’t stress out that you have to use everything pick the tools that work for you, then work them.

Take RSS, Muhammad uses Yahoo Pipes to filter RSS feeds to weed out duplicate entries.  I use aideRSS, but lots of other people like the dashboard sites (I’m with Sarah Perez, often they don’t work for me–though I do check Techmeme regularly).  No matter what you choose the idea is that you use the tools that give you the end result you need.

This series is written for freelancers, but essentially I think all knowledge workers are freelancers in many ways.  Even if you work for a big company, if you work in this sphere information and working with it is key.  Social media, can be a giant time suck.  Getting the most out of social media means trying a few things, deciding what you want and need, then just forgetting the rest.

Photo by Tris Hussey

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a lot of discussion about FriendFeed vs SocialThing!.  My own take, which isn’t all that awe inspiring, but I do fall into the “FriendFeed makes my info overload worse” camp.

In a guest post on Read/Write Web, Muhammad Saleem interviews SocialThing! CEO Matt Galligan and we get some interesting insights into the differences, as Matt sees it, between FriendFeed and SocialThing!:

Recently people have been comparing lifestreaming services FriendFeed and Socialthing!, trying to determine which one will win or whether they even compete. For example, see ReadWriteWeb’s post FriendFeed vs SocialThing!. I signed up for FriendFeed when it first came out and more recently I was lucky enough to get a private beta invite for Socialthing! as well. I sat down with Socialthing! founder and CEO Matt Galligan, to get a little insight into the differences and similarities between the two products. Source: Interview: Socialthing! Founder Matt Galligan - ReadWriteWeb

While Matt acknowledges the similarities between SocialThing! and FriendFeed, he points out how it just works to pull things together.  When I added Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter to my account on SocialThing! all the friends I had in those places, became a part of my feed.  No need to “add friends” … I really liked that.

Of course FriendFeed does have its place.  Extending the conversation into other areas (which I’m not convinced is a good thing).  Though from a comment on my post, it might seem that the folks at CoComment are looking at a solution to the problem.

Regardless of where you stand on these new social aggregators, this is a great interview.

And yes, I have one, just one, invite to SocialThing!.