Social Subway – January 2010 Ideas

The fourth idea for my 365 social ideas is yet another service for combining your online profiles – but in a new unobtrusive way. The idea is to let you use social media the way that you do currently but expand what you do in one place to other places. Instead of every social site you use need to integrate with all the others you simply integrate all your social profiles with one new service, the Social Subway (working secretly below the surface), and it will automatically connect any of your actions with other relevant sites.

The three main social actions are link sharing, friendship changes and status updates. Friendship changes are a little difficult to automate across networks, but the two other actions are the most frequent anyway and are easily transferable. Today, I personally share links on both Facebook and Twitter, and sometimes via other profiles. I could create or use a service, that can automatically transfer my Twitter updates to Facebook, or I could use a service that could do the opposite. But if I also wanted this update to go to Linkedin, I would have to use another service for that. And a third service for transferring it to Friendfeed, Pipio, Yammer etc.

Imagine one service, that you grant full access to all your profiles (yes, it requires trust, so this whould have to be established first) and then it would automatically detect activity in any connected profile and then transfer this activity according to the established rules to other relevant social profiles unobtrusively as if you did it manually yourself.

Be aware, that this is not a new entry service, as most such services are where you have to add your links via a certain entry point, and then it will be propagated to your profiles. And this propagation is always spamming in ads for this service that you used to lure all your friends in as well. Such obtrusive behaviour-altering services will never survive and never grow huge. People will use them for a short while, but when they don’t sometimes (because what if you see a link on Facebook and want to re-share it, you won’t go elsewhere), you don’t get their service and when you do get their service, you find it a little annoying.

Why?

Unobtrusiveness is a future buzzword in my opinion. The most light-weight non-spamming services will survive. Furthermore, bridging networks directly is currently the most popular way to go, but it is simply too difficult to maintain, and you have to go everywhere to set up the interconnectivity rules. To get in there now with an easy solution for bridging networks silently and unobtrusively and across the services you use without trying to take advantage of you to get more users is a winner in my eyes.

What’s next?

Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.

Category: API, January 2010 Ideas 2 comments »