Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Social Tool Plumbing

Forget my social graph, I'm still trying to figure out my social tool graph!

By tool graph I mean how the various tools like Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, you know, are all connected together.  For now, my goal seems to be to keep my tool graph a sort of DAG, a directed acyclic graph.  All of the connections are one-way and, hopefully, there are no loops!  (I'm not sure exactly what would happen if there were.  I (and you) probably hope that we don't find out.)

I generally don't want any of the arrows to be two-directional.  That means I don't want people communicating back along the channels I publish on.  I want a different kind of control, and a lot of control, over the return channels.  So far I haven't found a general arrangement that fits that need, though the various things I've cobbled together (e.g., using Facebook) work pretty well.

Buzz seems to break my plan in a grand way, at least initially, so I'm not quite sure what to do with Buzz yet.  I've set up a gmail account just for Buzz while I try to figure it out.

For now, I'm sticking to Twitter and Blogs for publishing.  For the replies, I have lots of channels out there and availble that one can use.