It’s been a while since my last post. And there has been a reason for it, actually. I’ve been working on a new project, the Social Media Scripting Framework: a PowerShell-based environment that abstracts the complexities of modern Social Media Channels from the PowerShell command-line.
There is not question that Social Media Technologies have opened the door, not only to new ways of interaction and relationship, but also to new ways to evaluate and measure them. However, after looking at the current ecosystem of tools and solutions for a while, I’ve observed that many of them, and sometimes all of them, follow similar structural patterns. For example:
- Form factor: SaaS delivered through the web. This, actually, is a very convenient way to provide a service while hiding the complexities to the consumer. But, unfortunately, this virtue is at the same time the main drawback. More often than not, our SaaS provider only focuses on a discrete set of functionalities and forces us to look somewhere else to fill in the gaps. At the end of the day, we end up with a collection of web services that we try to “orchestrate” by means of some sort of “digital craftsmanship”.
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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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