Since I do use it a bit like twitter, I tend to make my posts public. Not all of them, but many of them. And since I am nearly the only person who uses Plus, I figured I might as well push my public posts to twitter and facebook as well. Why not? And this is where things started to go off the rails.

First off, there's the question of how do I even get things across the platforms? Thanks to the fact that a lot of money rests on which social network 'wins', it's not that easy. I finally found a tool (Rob McGee) that pushes things across. But, of course, if I'm pushing things to twitter, I need some sort of link shortener. And since I also like to know whether anyone is reading what I write, I used one that lets me track clickthroughs - bit.ly.

So now let's review - say I'm reading an article on how other animals are much better dancers than penguins, and I want to share it. My current workflow is: (1) copy the story URL and (2) paste it into the bit.ly box. (3) Copy the shortened URL and (4) post it into the Google Plus status update box. (5) Write something pithy that is less than 140 characters. (6) Add Rob McGee to the post so it will be sent to twitter and facebook, and, finally, (7) hit the post button.

On my phone (and I'm sure I could find a plug-in for my browser), I can hit the menu on my browser and say 'share this to facebook'. Someday I hope - I really hope - I can do the same with all my social networks at once. But I've a sneaky suspicion it's going to get worse before it gets better.

But it's also worth noting that right now the female vocalist is fairly popular - something to do with Glee and Adele, I think. It's all crazy complicated, but the idea that all of these pop phenomena feed each other and lead to each other is fun, if complicated to work through.

The first thing I needed to do was to figure out... well, what I needed to do. So I hit a few websites, basically looking for directions on how to write my first app (by tradition, this a program that simply prints "Hello, world!" on the screen). I found several pages that all told me the basic steps (this one is an example). Sadly, although the information in the post was good, Google's support of developers does not seem to be - their servers spent most of a day rejecting requests for the files. So eight hours later I'm no closer to being able to write a program than I was when I started. I'm considering giving up for the day and doing something more fun than watching paint dry.