Social Media problems

My wife is working on becoming a midwife (almost there!) and I am interested in midwives and the problems they face and if there might be software solutions to those problems.

I searched twitter midwife I got what you would expect - twitters about women going to their midwives and looking for one and birth stories, etc. The example above works really great when you have a very narrow clearly defined search that you want to connect to. Searching for qooxdoo might get you 1 hit per day. In my search for midwives, I found 100's, but only one (future) midwife.

Assuming I did get a list of midwives, and I started following them - why would they be interested in following my stream of consciousness about javascript, python, things the kids said, and whatever else I'm doing, which brings me to one concern that I have about social media.

• Problem one:

  Everyone lives in a number of worlds, I am a husband, father, programmer, etc. and I would suspect that those who care what funny thing my kids said wouldn't care at all about some javascript, python or lisp thing that I'm working on and vise-versa.

  This is most likely a generation gap question, I would suppose that most that use social media on a regular basis have very little problem having everything from every corner of their life (and from their ) all in one place. The idea that we separate work from family (or any other of our ) and that these are two separate dimensions is a concept from a previous generation.

• Problem two:

  how do you keep up with everyones postings? Some might be really interesting, but lets say you are approaching it from a marketing or information gathering perspective as @fjakobs did? Not only do I worry that people may not be interested in what I am saying, I worry about finding what other people are saying and managing all of the stuff that comes through.

  I think the simple answer is that you don't. You don't try to manage the though process going either in or out (well, within reason . . .) - if you catch it you catch it, if you don't you don't if you find that someone is carrying on too much about stuff you aren't interested in, you can always quit following (unless it's your mom!).

• Problem three:

  Twitter, FaceBook, Tumblr, blogs - wow there are so many things out there. People must find a way to manage their connections. When I post, it would be nice to have it automatically post to my twitter account with the headline and a tinyurl, and facebook (not that I have account) and whatever else I want. (then again see This Post

So, what other problems do you have with social media? How do you deal with these problems and more??

Let me know!