Continuing on our theme of internet corporations making me sad, it has come to my attention that the very thing which I lauded twitter and facebook for is about to stop working: at some point in the near future, Twitter will break the Twitter-to-Facebook integration that I rely on to keep entertaining my public. This is because Twitter has decided that they are no longer just a pilot fish in the great internet sea -- they are a destination that is important in and of itself, and therefore there's nothing to be gained by letting Twitter content leak out to other social platforms where someone else can monetize it. If you want The Twitter, you can come to The Twitter, and The Twitter will happily serve you ads along with the content you desire.
For those of us further up the product foodchain, though, the question becomes: now what?
There is a temptation to just simply shift the burden to the reader and force them to charge around to the various social media sites to pick up the pieces of my communications that they care to receive. This is by far the easiest for me, as it means I can just write what I want, when I want, and where it occurs to me, and my faithful readers will of course spring to action and visit all of these lovely sites.
Yeah.
A scenario made even more unlikely due to the fact that A) none of these services let information out in RSS format and B) since Google Reader is being retired, there isn't a decent RSS reader left to read these non-existent feeds anyways.
I'm still seeking social media nirvana, where I can post something and it is automatically disseminated across all the services I use. This will never happen, since Facebook and Google are sworn enemeis, and now Twitter flatters themselves that they can sit at the same table.
Let's briefly look at the competition:
Twitter: microblogging. Not suitable for complex thought, but it is pretty interactive. The advertising is pretty unobtrusive (and currently totally absent if you use a client like Tweetdeck, although rumor has it that Tweetdeck is also going to be binned).
Google Plus: Google just loves you for your data, your sweet sweet demographics data that lets them serve advertising somewhere to.. someone. No one is really sure.
Facebook: all the privacy-violating goodness of Google, except the someone they are serving ads to is you and your readers, and the ads themselves are hilariously bad. Oh, and the chance that there's an actual audience on Facebook is only about 500% higher.
Audience-wise: I think it is a toss up between Twitter and Facebook for numbers.
I've toyed with a number of ideas: there's a service which allegedly will post from one social media platform to another, all you have to do is give it your credentials for everything (ick). Or maybe just doing everything in Blogger (hey! a fourth platform!) and trying to find some like-on-Facebook, tweet-with-Twitter, and +1 buttons and just pushing all three myself when I post something here. That'll get the word out, and drive traffic back to me here. Of course that just turns this Blogger thing into a Tumblr (hey! a fifth service!), doesn't it, so maybe I should just go there and put the buttons on posts there?
I think I still have a tumblr... I wonder if I wrote down the access credentials anywhere.
Anyways this is all forcing me to make decisions, and everyone knows how much I love decisions. So nobody is holding their breath on this.
I'm sure there will be a general announcement if and when I decide what I'm doing.
