During the last few years, internet-based social networking has experienced exponential growth in popularity and become a current trend.  It takes the form of social networking web sites or tools which provide convenient facilities for connecting people and maintaining communications.  Every popular trend bring great promises, and often than not, also great chaos.  The chaos comes from the springing up of enormous social networking web sites that are sparsely adopted by the very people whom we want to be connected with.  With friends opting to use different social networking sites or tools, it becomes impractical and often difficult to maintain consistent personal status updates.  A integration solution that spans across them is required.  The solution should should aim to minimise efforts by eliminating possible need for duplicated efforts.

Looking at the recent adoption of social networking tools based on friends I know, Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live Messenger are the common ones.  With this in mind, I have settled (for the time being) with using these three social networking tools.  The solution in this article looks at personal status synchronisation between Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live Messenger "Personal Status Message" (PSM).  Personal status update is a way to communicate to friends what we are doing, and hence promoting "fresh" communication.  This feature is available in the tools under consideration by this article.

There are many solution combinations out there which tackle the problem from different perspectives and different usage scenarios.  The solution described in this article adopts Twitter as “coordinator” of personal status updates.  Twitter is a good choice for this role as it provides numerous options or methods or channels for updating personal status, such as SMS, web, API, gtalk and others.  More recently, Microsoft’s Bing search engine also index into personal statuses of Twitter’s accounts.  The solution scope is limited to solving the following information flow in term of status synchronisation:

• Twitter to Facebook
• Twitter to Windows Live Messenger PSM
• Windows Live Messenger PSM to Twitter
• Windows Live Messenger PSM to Windows Live

The rest of this article takes a look at each of the above personal status information flow.  Note that Windows Live personal status update from Windows Live Messenger PSM to Windows Live is a feature of the product.  No action is required for this case. 

Twitter to Facebook
Personal status synchronisation from Twitter to Facebook is achieved by adding the Facebook’s Twitter application and setting it up to point to your Twitter account.  The following link should lead directly the application addition page for the Twitter application in Facebook:

     http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2231777543

For detailed tutorial of setting up Twitter application in Facebook, please refer to article "How To Sync Your Twitter and Facebook Status Updates".

Twitter to Windows Live Messenger PSM
In order to update the Windows Live Messenger PSM, additional software is required to be installed on the computer where Windows Live Messenger is running on.  The following are required:

• Windows Live Plus! – this is a Windows Live Messenger plug-in that allows custom scripts to be run.
• Twit2MSN – this is a Windows Live Plus! script that actually update your Windows Live Messenger PSM from your most recent Twitter's status.

For detailed on how to setup Twit2MSN, please refer to the Matt Dyson's site. Matt Dyson is the author of the Twit2MSN script.

Windows Live Messenger PSM to Twitter
If you are using Windows Live Messenger, it is common to update personal status through Windows Live Messenger PSM directly.  This calls for personal status update to flow from Windows Live Messenger PSM to Twitter, which in turn will update the status on your Facebook account.  To achieve this, the following are required:

• Windows Live Plus! – this is a Windows Live Messenger plug-in that allows custom scripts to be run.  This is only required if it is not previously installed.
• Twitter Psm Pusher – this is a Windows Live Plus! script that update your Twitter’s status from your Windows Live Messenger PSM.

For detailed on how to setup "Twitter Psm Pusher', please refer to Elias's site.  Elias is the author of the "Twitter Psm Pusher" script.

As a close to this article, the following presents a diagrammatic overview of the described solution: