Tutorial: Building Your Ultimate Social Networking Console

With hundreds of social networking websites in a constant cycle of death and rebirth, it’s fairly common for one person to have multiple accounts. Here is how you can use your iGoogle page to view and update all your social networks from a single console. For the more advanced users, I’ve included some extra tips.

1. First you need a Google account. You can sign up for one here. Make sure you’re sign in and go to iGoogle. If you already have your iGoogle page set up, you can create a new tab by clicking the little down-pointing arrow next to “Home” on the left. This will give you a fresh new tab to work with.
2. Once you’ve got a clean slate, go to the iGoogle widgets directory. Here you can choose widgets that work with each of your social networks. For your convenience, here are some common links:
   ~ BeTwittered – Allows you to view your tweets and direct messages, also allows you to post and reply within the iGoogle widget.
   ~ FriendFeed – View your feed & post replies.
   ~ Facebook – View your friends news feed & check your messages. You’ll probably want to adjust the settings on this widget to display your friends tab by default. Widget settings are usually accessed with the down-pointing arrow in the upper right corner of the widget box.
   ~ Livejournal – Displays the mobile version of your LJ friends feed. You might need to adjust your browser settings to allow cookies & 3rd party cookies in order for this to work. You can do this in Firefox by going to Tools > Options > Privacy.
3. You may be able to find widgets for more of your social networks by using the search tool in the widgets directory. For instances where you can’t find a pre-made widget, here’s a couple work-arounds while you wait for your networks to get with the times:
   ~ RSS feeds – This works well when you want to read something that’s frequently updated, such as this blog.
   ~ iFrame – This will let you view any website inside the widget’s bounding box. If you can, use a mobile version of the site to save space. Some sites display better than others, so you may have to scroll around to actually use the site from within the widget. It’s not the most practical thing ever, but you can view any site this way, so it guarantees that you can get all your social networks in one place.
4. For the finishing touch, let’s free up some screen real-estate by getting rid of the nasty left-hand tabs that take up so much width. This only works in Firefox, so you’ll have to get that first. Then, you’ll need to install the Greasemonkey add-on. This will enable your browser to read the iGoogle Sidebar Collapse script, which you can get here. For further instructions on this method, see here.

Ta Da! Now you have your very own social networking console!