Sooner or later we all end up having our own instance of a Social Media mashup. Our Interconnection Map will, hopefully, fulfill our needs and evolve with us and with time. However, no matter how complex it is, it will only address our more basic integration or automation needs.
The attention economy and relationships in the on-line world are heavily driven or influenced by the content we share. Unfortunately, content curation can be very time consuming. In other words, if we have to fight for audience attention, it is very likely that we start pushing our available resources to the limits:
- maybe we are focused on some knowledge areas, but let many others uncovered.
- perhaps we don’t cover some topics deeply enough.
- we may not have so much time and don’t update quickly enough.
- maybe our network and social influence is limited.
- …
Additionally, everyone has the ability to deploy his own mashup in order to automate his social activity. So, unless you start paying for automation services or come up with a very clever Service Interconnection Design, at the end of the day, almost everyone is more or less on the same situation.
The question is, then, if there is any strategy that we can explore in order to make a difference.
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That Twitter wants to exercise more control over their user’s experience and, hence, its whole ecosystem, it is not new. Until now, Twitter’s moves in this direction haven’t had major and practical impact on how we were used to consume the service. For example:
Ok, I admit that this second one, represents a threat for some users and developers in the medium term. But, fortunately, I haven’t seen any issues because of it. However, that only means that I am not aware of them, not that they don’t exist. So, if you happen to know of any, just let me know!
The context is quite different now. Substantially, I’d say. Why? Because we have started to directly observe and feel the consequences of Twitter’s “Developer Rules of the Road”. For example, IFTTT users have recently received two notifications regarding Twitter-owned services:
- Upcoming changes to Twitter Triggers
- IFTTT Has Stopped Supporting Posterous Channels
Additionally, RSS feeds for user’s timelines have been integrated into the API. In other words, the traditional RSS links no longer work.
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Last year I started looking at ways to handle the amount of Social Media presence in a reasonable way. Then, I came up with a Social Media Interconnection Map and a set of design rules, principles and guidelines that we could take into account shall we wanted to build our own.
Unfortunately, everything moves insanely fast in the technology space and so many things have changed since that first proposal. In fact, I have had to adapt my original design several times over the past months due to a number of reasons:
- new players have emerged or exploded: Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, Posterous, Instagram, SlideShare, LinksAlpha, ifttt, dlvr.it, So.cl, Outlook.com, …
- new types of services have also appeared: Google Hangouts, Google Events, SocialBro, BufferApp, …
- some services have disappeared: Google Buzz, PicPlz, LightBox, Jaiku, ping.fm, …
- … and others have become less relevant: blip.tv, status.net, …
- some APIs have changed and/or so do its Terms and Conditions: Twitter not playing with LinkedIn anymore and breaking the 140 character limit with the notion of “expanded tweets”; Google’s new Terms & Conditions; the “new” write access to Google+ Pages; the Facebook Open Graph adoption; Spotify integration with Facebook; …
- relevant Mergers & Acquisitions have taken place: SlideShare is now owned by LinkedIn, Posterous and TweetDeck have been acquired by Twitter, Yammer and Skype by Microsoft; Instagram now belongs to Facebook, Trunk.ly to delicious.com and Radian6 to SalesForce.com; SocialCast is now part of VMWare’s Portfolio and so did Citrix with Podio, Atos with BlueKiwi, etc…
- the availability of resilient, reliable and easy to use filtering and transformation tools.
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