In today’s electronic world, different mediums make sense for different types of messages. I send my short, tiny blips to Twitter. When I have something longer to say, or want to get it to reach more people, I post it on Facebook. Longer “articles” typically end up on my blog at robohara.com.

And the cool thing is, all of these things talk to one another. My “tweets” get replicated instantly to Facebook as well. And when I post a new blog, well, lots of cool things happen. First, my blog sends a notice to Twitter, and that notice replicated to Facebook. Additionally, that same post appears on LiveJournal and MySpace. It’s a great system because I have friends that use all of those services, and with very little effort, I can reach them all.

Each of these services encourages and offers ways to share their (your) data with other sites; the problem is, these same services also spend equal amounts of time trying to keep other services from working with them. Earlier this year, Facebook quit allowing Twitter to update statuses (you can still post to your wall with it though). MySpace blocked WordPress, this blocked that … it’s frustrating. Every site is stilling to let you export information, but it seems to be a continual battle as to who will let you import streams from other sites.

The latest one to break everything was Twitter, who by changing their authentication methods, has broken everything. My WordPress site can no longer update Twitter — so, my blog notifications never make it to Twitter, which never forwards it to Facebook. Twitter’s new authentication process is so different that it actually broke both of the Twitter apps on my iPhone. Go, Twitter!

So now WordPress won’t talk to Twitter — says it’s a problem with PHP. After messing with PHP, I can see that it’s not running CURL. I tried installing CURL twice tonight and ended up completely destroying my web server. Thank goodness for virtual servers and snapshots …

Anyway, for the time being, that’s where things stand. Hopefully someone will simplify the WordPress > Twitter connection process soon and I’ll be back in business. Until then, I’ll either manually update Twitter announcing new blog posts, or more likely, I won’t. :/