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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Innovation = Sales activity
This paradigm usually appears when a customer tells you that he “misses innovative proposals from you”. As you might have figured out, this is a Sales activity but not an Innovation one: Proposing something is selling, not innovating.
Anyway, we must question ourselves who is really innovating just in case we’ve successfully sold something innovative:
- We? If we are distributing a third-party solution or selling items from our own Portfolio, obviously not. However, if we are involved on a Solution Sales process, there is room for innovations as part of the Solution Design.
- Our customer? Not necessarily, but most likely. We will revisit this point later on when the paradigm “Innovation = Catching up” paradigm gets commented, though.
- Both? Any combination of these two previous considerations.
These situations, though, are usually very nice opportunities to grab feedback that could be used to enrich your Innovations. So, we should better not turn them down!
Innovation = “What we have never done before”
This paradigm can show up when there is something new that has to be done.
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