IF THIS THEN THAT: Social Web's Duct Tape & Tumblr

gbattle:

ifttt is quietly building an arsenal of powerful small tools that are making them the duct tape of the social web.  Just as specific tools like hammers, chisels, saws and APIs are great in the hands of a skilled craftsman/developer, duct tape can fit the bill for connecting anything to anything for the numerous unskilled.  The ifttt repository for Tumblr might be where David & the Tumblr Crew mine for clues/ambassadors as they begin to embrace the developer community to create tools for the masses.  

I use ifttt to work around the inoperable import-posts-from-rss feature of tumblr, for example. I have a blog called Upstreamed which I follow here at stoweboyd.com, and I have set up a ifttt recipe for new posts of non-tumblr blogs I want to follow are posted to Upstreamed. Then the posts show up in my Tumblr stream, as if Tumblr supported the idea of following non-tumblr blogs.

Twitter Activity Streams: Surfacing Social Gestures Like Tumblr

Twitter is preparing to roll out a fairly significant rethinking of the user experience for the microstreaming service. They are planning to bring the social gestures that users make out in the open. These gestures are the actions of following people, favoriting tweets, retweets, or adding people to lists. Some of that gestural information has been available in Twitter to date, but most of it hasn’t been found in the stream along with the tweets themselves.

The change will come by changing the ‘@mentions’ tab into two:

MG Siegler, Twitter Comes Alive With Realtime Activity Streams

Specifically, the “@Mentions” tab on twitter.com is being replaced by two new tabs: “@USERNAME” and “Activity”. These two streams will add an additional layer to Twitter and to Tweets themselves, a layer showing the social activity around them.

The @USERNAME (obviously, USERNAME will be replaced by your Twitter name) stream will still show your @replies, but it will also show things like when someone follows you, when someone favorites one of your Tweets, when someone retweets one of your Tweets, or when someone adds you to a list.

The Activity stream will show you all of those things, but related to all of the people you follow on Twitter. In other words, you can see if a connection has retweeted a Tweet, or if they followed someone new, etc.

Siegler doesn’t say that the current Timeline tab — which shows the tweets from you and all that you follow — will remain unchanged, but that is my interpretation at present.

Surfacing social gestures in general — and making favoriting a social preoccupation instead of a not very robust bookmarking tool — is a great way to make Twitter a richer social experience. In fact, this shift feels like Twitter has taken a long hard look at Tumblr, and has decided to capitalize on that social networked blogging platform’s success, which is driven to a great extent by the richness of social gestures, which are presented in stream. Here’s a snippet of my Tumblr stream, showing gestures and a post:

I wrote a piece not too long ago, What Twitter Could Learn From Tumblr, which focused on the efforts that Tumblr has recently put into its support of tags, and curation of tagged topics. (For those still not familiar with Tumblr, you might read Comparing Tumblr To Wordpress.)

But it seems like the social gestures of Tumblr — which are natively presented in the Tumblr stream — will be the first innovation to jump from Tumblr to Twitter.

I wonder if Twitter will take the ‘notes’ idea from Tumblr, as well? In Tumblr, all the social gestures associated with a post can be displayed on that post’s page (depending on the template settings). So If I post something that garners a great deal of interest — getting liked and reposted a great deal — there is a long series of gestures shown on that page. In a sense, the post has it’s own associated stream: all the gestures that it caused.

On Twitter this would mean that the page associated with a tweet — the one reached by clicking on the tweet’s timestamp — might show all the favorites and retweets tied to the tweet. Will have to see if this will be done.

And oh, there is still all that work to be done on tags, which Twitter still doesn’t seem to be very interested in, yet.

‘Who To Follow’ Feature on Twitter

I saw MG Siegler’s post this morning about a new ‘Who To Follow’ user search feature on Twitter. I opened the Twitter page and there is was:

Twitter was recommending two people I might want to follow and currently have not been. There is a ‘view all’ link that takes you to a second screen:

and on this screen the rationale (or part of one) as to why I might want to follow, say, Jolie O’Dell is presented in the form of other people that are following her.

This is going to turn out to have results much like the recommended users’ list: those that have lots of followers will be displayed more frequently, which will simply accelerate the power laws.

Now, I am assuming that the ‘recommenders’ — those whose names show up as followers of the suggested users — are people known to me, which makes it a social analysis at least. But I would have to know something about their algoritm to find out if it does more than that.

For example, I might be interested in following more people in the design world, and fewer professional writers. Or, more directly, I might not to see recommendations of people that I used to follow but no longer do. Or I may want to follow people that follow and are followed by people from very different social circles from me.

At present none of this possible twiddling is made accessible to us, but certainly Twitter could wander in that direction over time, making it a much more useful tool for growing your network. But even in this preliminary state, I see that it will lead to a surge in following behavior over the next weeks and months, and an especially big help to newbies.

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