For a few months now I have been looking for a tool that would allow me to, in one fell-swoop, make a single post to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. When I take time to put together quality content, I want to share it equally among my networks. For some reason, for my social connections, there is very little overlap between G+ and Facebook. All of my friends that use G+, use it exclusively. All of my Facebook friends (of which there are more acquaintances than g+) avoid G+ like the plague.

In the end, what I discovered was that the best tool is just to DO IT YOURSELF. I probably spent around 3-4 hours researching and trying out different tools. Many of the tools were too invasive, and required extensive permissions to all of my accounts (such as G++ accessing my information on Facebook when I wasn't using the application), others were too slow, or didn't cross-post things like links, which are recognized very well by both g+ and Facebook in different ways.  In the end, the total amount of time I spent researching this far surpassed any time I will need to spend cross-posting for the next year or two.

To take a single post, and then copy and paste it between two social networks which you are already using, takes around 15 seconds, and you achieve a far better experience by maintaining control of your content, and by being able to leverage the native capabilities of the network.

Google's relentless quest to improve performance for all things technologic continues. They have just hit a huge success with SPDY, their replacement for HTTP for web transactions. Now, with a few simple linux commands, you can download, install, and activate an Apache module that will speed up everything for all of your supporting Chrome and Firefox users.  This is a great thing to do because it is one half of the SPDY adoption question, and will help move the entire web forward into a faster, newer generation. Fortunately there is no downside. Users not yet capable of SPDY will imply failover to the slower HTTP transaction.

Install SPDY on Apache by doing the following (assuming a 64 bit system):

That's it, you are done. You will now see CHrome users negotiating with SPDY. YOu can verify this by visiting Chrome Network Internals

For the past week or so I have been running my SGS-T989 on the Ice Cream Sandwich rom called BlackEdition. This ROM takes the ICS hardware support from the Galaxy S II Skyrocket currently available on AT&T, and ports it back to our SGS II -T-Mobile. While it's very exciting to get access to ICS, the speed, the data monitor, and most of all, access to Chrome on my phone. There are still a few issues.

Media Scanner Issues

The media scanner in this kernel has some sort of major malfunction, as it will not stop scanning. What this means for me, is that the phone never goes into a proper sleep, and my battery just gets shredded to bits. As in, less than 6 hours from fully charged to dead. It also makes charging super-slow, so it's almost better to turn my phone off to charge.

Wifi Tether Issues

Initially when I went into the Android Settings to turn on the Wifi-Tether on which I have grown completiely reliant, the setting would not turn on. After experiementing and trying all of the different configuration options, I gave up. A few days later, I noticed that there was a configuration toggle in the top bar of the notification pull-down. I tried it out, and lo-and-behold, there was the Wifi-Tether that I had been hoping for so strongly. It now works great, although combined with the Media Scanner Issue, my battery can be shredded to bits in an hour or two.

ACore Issues

About once every 20 or so minutes of use, the android core process will stop, freezing my entire phone, and preventing any operation for about 8-9 seconds.  While not actually losing any work, or preventing me from being effective, it's very annoying.

In the past month or so, three new ICS ROMs have become available for the Samsung Galaxy SII for T-Mobile.  These ROMS have their own issues and problems, and I don't feel like any of them are ready as daily drivers yet.  

None of the ROMs worked "out of the box" for me, and I had to do some digging to get them to work.  Each one entered an infinite boot loop that I had to pull the battery to get out of.  Remember, if you want to boot into recovery, ensure the SGS2 is powered off, then hold volume up, volume down, and power until the Samsung logo appears.  The solution for these boot loops was to do a more thorough wipe than the standard Factory Reset. There is a special tool called DARKSIDE.SUPER.WIPE that will fully erase your system, cache, and data partitions. Make sure you do a full Nandroid backup before doing this, as this will definitely erase parts of your OS.

Here are my notes on each rom.

[ROM] [cwm]-ICS-4.0.3-Self-Kang

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1566811

This ROM was the first ROM I tried. After getting it to boot successfully, I attempted to make a phone call and discovered that there were no APNs included with the ROM for T-Mobile. Not wanting to manually install APNs, this ROM was not for me.  I may come back to this one though, as it was the only pure Android ROM, without any TouchWiz, ruining the quality and asthetic of Ice Cream Sandwich.

Download

MD5 Checksum

7b2fe73e6ed1234a8c29d55934747f91

[ROM] Skyrocket ICS Port

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1570012

This was the second ROM I tried. This ROM had no APNs either unfortunately. This meant that for me it was unsuitable as a daily driver.

Download

[ROM][cwm]-BLACKEDITION FOR THE SGS2 3-29-2012-ICS

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1531189 

Finally a ROM with APNs, but overall I am definitely not a fan of TouchWiz, and the continuing issues with autorotation and a general lack of polish across all of these ROMs prevented me from adopting it as a daily driver.

Download