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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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:

1. new players have emerged or exploded: Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, Posterous, Instagram, SlideShare, LinksAlpha, ifttt, dlvr.it, So.cl, Outlook.com, …
2. new types of services have also appeared: Google Hangouts, Google Events, SocialBro, BufferApp, …
3. some services have disappeared: Google Buzz, PicPlz, LightBox, Jaiku, ping.fm, …
4. … and others have become less relevant: blip.tv, status.net, …
5. 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; …
6. 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…
7. the availability of resilient, reliable and easy to use filtering and transformation tools.



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As time goes by, it becomes more common to see ourselves contracting services on-line. They are diverse, easy to consume, mature enough, convenient and economic. Some times we see our friends, relatives or colleagues consuming them and, once we get to know details about their experiences, we feel it is the right moment to start and experience the service ourselves.

Many of them are really economic (in the range of 1 to 5 euros/month), so we don’t feel the need of any sort of financial control. And here lays the problem:

• It is extremely easy to loose control of how many of these “inexpensive services” we finally end up consuming at the end of the day.
• Even worse, we may be paying those services on foreign currencies without being conscious of the impact that it is really having. May be, we can’t leave the service for whatever reason and we are not aware that the currency exchange rate is a real risk.
• May be, our country is forcing your Cloud Service Provider to apply local taxes for users on his territory. Taxes change and evolve with time and, may be, we didn’t notice that we are now paying more than what we originally started paying for that service or subscription.



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