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The European telecom Orange wants to make your summer more dramatic by giving your tweets the movie-voiceover treatment. The program, which runs until June 17, is open to anyone who puts the hashtag #thissummer at the end of their tweets. The spoken tweets are displayed on Orange’s website. As might be expected, the dramatic music [...]

Life moves pretty fast. Sometimes it moves so fast we just don’t have time to stop and maintain all of our social networks individually. But that’s no reason to leave your Facebook profile barren, because you don’t even have to make it all the way to Facebook to update your status.

Here are some methods of updating your Facebook profile when on the go or while using some of the other networks and services you already use.

Update Facebook from Firefox

An easy to use Firefox extension called FireStatus can enable you to update your Facebook status right from a collapsible tray at the bottom of your browser. It also includes a URL shortening function as well, and you can set whether you’d like tinyURL or urlBorg as your short URL service in the preferences.

FireStatus can also handle updates to Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious and Identi.ca as well, making it a handy method for updating any of those services if you’re already in your browser.

Update Facebook from Twitter

There are a few ways to pipe your Twitter status updates right into Facebook, avoiding the need to double post items or spend a ton of time maintaining a dual-life on both networks.

Twitter to Facebook – This Facebook app simply sends all your Twitter updates right into Facebook as status updates with one important exception: @reply tweets will not appear.

Selective Twitter – If you’re looking for more manual control over exactly which Twitter updates make it over to Facebook, you might want to try this app instead. It only sends tweets at Facebook status updates if you include the hashtag #fb at the end of your message.

Twitter clients – Once you’ve set up either of the above Facebook apps to pipe Twitter into Facebook, you can of course use any desktop or mobile Twitter client to continue updating your Facebook status as well.

Update Facebook from Text Messages (SMS or MMS)

Facebook has mobile services built right in, making it easy to both send status updates in and get information back out to your phone. To enable posting from your phone, go to the Mobile tab under your Account Settings. You’ll have to Add a Phone number to associate it with your account and begin sending status updates, so click on the Add phone number link.

You’ll be prompted to choose your carrier, then send a text message to Facebook from your phone. The Facebook mobile number is 32665 (FBOOK), which you’ll probably want to add to your contacts list for easy retrieval. Facebook will send back a confirmation code when it receives your SMS, which you then enter into the next step.

After successfully linking your mobile phone to your account, you can begin sending status updates to 32665. You can also modify the type and frequency of text alerts sent back to your phone when friends interact with your profile or send you messages, and set whether or not you want to receive confirmation messages when updating from your phone. You can even turn off all the incoming text alerts and still continue to send your own status updates to Facebook.

To send photos or videos by MMS, you essentially want to follow the protocol in the email section below. Find your personalized upload email address and use that as the recipient for your MMS message, and you can send media right from your phone to Facebook.

Update Facebook by Email

Facebook added a way for you to send photos or videos to your profile page via email. You can find your unique personal upload email on the Facebook mobile page. Simply attach the photos or videos you’d like to send in your email, and use the subject line as the caption (if you upload more than one piece of media at a time, they will all get the same caption). By default the media you send will be incorporated into your “Mobile Upload” photo album, subject to its privacy settings.

Thanks to commenters Robert Basil and Andrew for pointing out that there’s another great option that could belong either in this category or in the status update services section below: Posterous is another excellent service that will easily update several social services including Facebook by email.

Update Facebook from Status Update Services

Status update services are emerging out of the swelling sea of social sites and the growing need to manage them all. These sites typically store your login credentials for all the networks you participate in, and allow you to update any or all of them in one fell swoop. They can save you the time updating lots of individual sites when what you really want is the same message broadcast multiple places.

Two very full-featured offerings in this category are ping.fm and hellotxt. Of the two, hellotxt has been around longer (since 2007), although ping.fm has grown fairly popular in its own right. Both services offer posting to dozens of social networks from a number of different sources, so you may simply want to try both and decide which one you like best.

Update Facebook from Instant Messenger

This is a simple solution, because it’s the same as the previous section. You can use either ping.fm or hellotxt to send updates to Facebook from your instant messenger client. Typically you’ll add a special chat bot that you need to send messages to in order to update your Facebook status. Services supported include AOL Instant Messenger, Gtalk / Jabber, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and MSN.

Update Facebook from Third-Party Sites

The number of sites that support sending updates to Facebook either through the API or as an application continue to grow every day. If it’s a service you use frequently and want to pipe into Facebook, it’s worth investigating whether the site supports it, provides an app, or whether a third-party has developed a connector app to link the two services.

Just a few of the sites and services that can be connected to your Facebook page include Pandora, Wordpress via Wordbook, last.fm (you might want to try their What I’m Listening To app for a simpler method as well), Flickr, Qik, Ustream, gamerDNA, Raptr, and more.

Additionally, almost anything that outputs an RSS feed can be imported to your Facebook profile via the Notes application. Any time you update that site, service or feed, it will also then be displayed on your Facebook profile.

Just take care about which sites you route into each other, in case you inadvertently end up double posting (or worse!) items to your feed. Take a few moments and plan out which services you think your Facebook friends would even care about as well — it’s not necessarily the best idea to dump absolutely everything you do everywhere into your profile. But used thoughtfully and in moderation, you can keep an active Facebook profile going without exhausting yourself trying to keep all your networks updated on your every thought and breakfast selection.

Have any other useful tips for posting to Facebook without going to Facebook? Are there other Facebook tips you’d like to see here? Let us know in the comments!

More Facebook resources from Mashable:

- 20+ Great Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your Facebook Experience
- 10 Fantastic iPhone Apps That Use Facebook Connect
- The Journalist’s Guide to Facebook
- Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference?
- HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook

Tags: facebook, facebook tips, hellotxt, MMS, ping.fm, SMS, status updates

There may be one more sure thing in life beyond death and taxes: spammers. Twitter is of course no stranger to the scourge, and TweetBlocker is a new tool designed to help you get rid of any spam accounts you’ve inadvertently managed to follow, whether in haste or through the use of auto-follow.

Using a combination of blacklist-style identification and Bayesian algorithms for identifying spammers from the contents of their tweets, this app from the folks at HashRocket adds another tool to our collective belts for fighting back against Twitter spam.

After authenticating your Twitter account, TweetBlocker generates a list of your followers with a numerical score as well as at-a-glance letter grades according to how spammy the service thinks they are, with A+ being the best and F the worst. From here you have the option to block or simply unfollow each account. Rolling over a user’s icon pops up a list of their most recent tweets so you can quickly double check any accounts you might be on the fence about.

In our tests we did find some false positives in our list as well as some questionably low grades for relatively popular accounts (see above — blip.tv passes with flying colors while Blip.fm seems dangerously close to repeating the fourth grade), but the recent tweets rollover function should help you make sure you’re not inadvertently blocking or unfollowing someone having a momentary lapse of reason or temporary absence from Twitter.

And as far as tools for helping cut the spam go, another addition to the arsenal — particularly one so easy to use — is entirely welcome to the Twitterverse.

Tags: auto-follow, spam, TweetBlocker, twitter

Soren Gordhamer is the author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected (HarperOne, 2009). His homepage is: www.sorengordhamer.com. You can follow him on Twitter.

There is growing body of people who actively use more than one social network, and do so with quite different purposes. Though on the surface many social networks seem similar, to use them skillfully it helps to better understand the different roles they can play in one’s online activity. Here’s what I have discovered in my use of both Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter

Connecting with Someone You Don’t Know

If I want to connect with someone I don’t know, either for business, social, or personal reasons, I first look the person up on Twitter. I can generally learn much more about them through scanning their tweets than I can in looking at what they choose to show on their Facebook page. Reading their tweets I get a better sense if I want to contact them, and if I do, what their personality and interests tend to be. I can either @reply them or I can usually find a contact email in the website they list on Twitter.

Of course, you can send people messages you do not know through Facebook, but such communication, to me, is more welcome via Twitter, as people still see Facebook (as much as they are trying to change) as oriented toward communicating with people one already knows.

Breaking News

Lets face it, there is nothing quite like Twitter for breaking news. Sure, people post news on Facebook, but there is no easy way to retweet posts or to discuss the subject with the entire community, as Twitter allows through use of the hashtag. Further, people on Facebook are often attending to various other tasks while on the site; for much of the Twitter crowd, discovering and sharing news is their primary focus.

New Learning and Discovery

Twitter could be seen as one massive introduction system, where users recommend other users both through retweeting and mentioning the person using the @username option. The popular #FollowFriday where users recommend other users is one example of this. Sure, you can recommend friends on Facebook, but not with same ease.

Due to such simplicity, on Twitter you do not just get to know what a person’s interests are, you also learn who influences that person, and can decide if these people are also of interest to you. As such, for new learning, I go to Twitter more than Facebook.

Facebook

Local News/Events

More of my Facebook friends live closer to me geographically than those who follow me on Twitter. Though many people on Twitter list where they live in their profile, I have not taken the time to discover the locations of those who follow me (and I do not want to take the time to do so). I can only guess that they are interspersed throughout the country, and as such I do not want to bother them with local news. Facebook is also aided by the ability to start groups focused on a variety of subjects, including focused on local areas.

There are certainly ways to find local Twitter users, and Twitter wants to make this easier. CEO Evan Williams addressed this some time back by suggesting using usernames as directional tools. People could follow @sf (for San Francisco), for example, then begin a post with @sf when they wanted to send information to those interested in the city. However, the effort has not seemed to gain traction, and how to make it easy and simple to access local information is still in its early stages on Twitter.

Connecting with Someone You Know

If I am trying to connect with someone that I know, I am more apt to use Facebook, if I know the person uses both Facebook and Twitter. Facebook allows me to see if the person is on the network at a given time, and I can easily start a quick chat with them, or start a Skype or phone call if I know they are free.

I can always, of course, send a private message to a friend through Twitter, but I like the immediacy of Facebook. I also find that I can have more sustained conversations on Facebook with those that I know, as people on Twitter focus more on “what’s new” than on sustaining a conversation as far back as yesterday. Facebook, with less emphasis on the latest news and more options for holding discussions, seems more suitable for longer conversations.

Help on an Issue

If I am looking for feedback on an issue, particularly personal, I am more apt to post it on Facebook. Though I have more than twice the number of followers on Twitter than friends on Facebook, recently when I posted on both networks asking what good audio books people could recommend for my son and I to listen to on a long drive, I had more than three times the responses on Facebook. Most the friends I have on Facebook I have met in person, and many have met my son, so they are in a much better place to make suggestions. It is not the same with those on Twitter.

Conclusion

While on the surface many social networks look the same, there are significant differences, both in their structure and what they emphasize, but also in the attitude that users bring. The more we understand these, the more we can know which social networks to use for what purposes.

Clearly, there are many other reasons beyond what is listed here for using both Twitter and Facebook. If you use both Twitter and Facebook, let us know, how you find yourself using one versus the other.

More social media resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Deal With Social Networking Overload
- Top 5 Funniest Fake Facebook Pages
- 10 Impressive Implementations of Facebook Connect
- Twitter for Beginners: 5 Steps for Better Tweeting

Tags: facebook, social networking, twitter