In this case the PITA involved here is not the tasty grain based item you would find in your favorite Mediterranean restaurant. It is an acronym for Pain In The Ass. This is where I get to inform folks about stuff that may work for most people but for some reason is not really worth using to me because of the PITA factor.
So, with that being said...
Social Median is a site that is sort of a community based news aggregation portal. You can join in on news streams based on different topics that are posted by other members. You can setup your own feeds to be posted on the site and there is a follow system similar to that of Friend Feed and Twitter.
I used the site for awhile to get news on certain topics and to identify people that tended to post on topics that I like to follow. This feature set works well and I had no issue here. I wanted to use the site to pull in my blog entries and push them out to other sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc. My issue was that if I happened to title one of my posts the same as some other site, my post would not get pulled into Social Median it would just link to the other post where ever that may have been. The most recent was a link that was supposed to go to my blog on wordpress.com but instead went to a page at the Nashville Post website. That is a deal breaker for a lot of bloggers that are trying to generate some exposure.
I also like the idea of being able to have one place where I could have all my blog posts pulled into and then be able to push them out to other social networks that I am involved in. The problem here is that whenever one of my posts had apostrophes or periods in them, the social median site would push the link out with a bunch of junk characters in the title. This made the links very hard to read and pretty amateurish which is not what you want if you are trying to attract positive attention.
To their credit when I posted tweets about these issues, Jason Goldberg (the founder) DM'd me asking what was going on. I explained the issues I was having and it escalated into their support side. I then received and acknowledgement about how my issues could be significant to members but no follow up on a timeline to fix the issues. The suggestion I got was to rename my posts so that they weren't the same as any others.
All in all, I'm sure the site is useful to many people but these few issues are more than I am willing to put up with. There are just too many options for news aggregation and social networking/media.
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