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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It’s a fact that the number of Social Networking Services is becoming so high that it is increasingly difficult to manage them appropriately. Of course, there is no need nor obligation to have an account on each of them.
It is also true that we all have preferences and these preferences change with time. Consequently, we can’t find everybody on the same place, be either physical or digital. Here is when we start considering on becoming part of the communities our friends, relatives, colleagues, workmates, or, simply, “interests” belong to.
The questions, then, are quite simple: What if we want to be where our people really is? How we can achieve it in a sustainable way? How can we make “The System” work for ourselves instead of the opposite? Which are our alternatives? Is there any strategy? Fortunately, the answer is yes: “Just Connect them All”.
Basically, there are three main interconnection implementations:
- Client-based: it requires a client with the ability to connect to multiple Social Networks from the same UI.
- Cloud-based: it tries to create an interconnection mesh of Social Network Services that connect directly among them.
- A custom combination of client and cloud-based implementations.
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It is not new that there is an explosion of services around the web that can play a role in a user-based mashup. I won’t count them all, because this will change after this note has been written. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just have a look to the Services connected by ShareThis or Ping.fm.
Many of these services will raise their own privacy questions/concerns. But, anyway, your questions may fall into these two categories:
- How this Service Provider will manage my data.
- Which are the Risks I’m facing on my use (publishing/sharing/…) of this service.
The Service Provider
Here you will have to remember that even though a Service doesn’t cost money, it doesn’t mean that it is free. The trade might be your data, and here we need to recall that “data” is not only the object of the Service, but also the hole context.
For example, in an e-mail service: the object is the Message and the context your Address Book, your Relationships Network taken from your conversations, the Time-Line, your Connection Calendar, your Activity Rate, Frequency, your Read Habits, Focus and Interests, etc.
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