Concept Paragrah

    In the past ten years social media has become one of the most dominant tools for interaction and self expression. Attempting to capitalize on this trend, many different forms of social media have emerged. Some have replaced older incarnations that have now passed their prim, such as Facebook and MySpace. Others coexists together, serving similar but distinct services, such as Twitter and Instagram. Keeping track of all of these different information sources can be a daunting task, especially if one wishes to continue to have a life outside of social media in the real world.

    Several programs have attempted to aid users in aggregating and viewing their various social media feeds. These include such tools as Flipboard, HootSuite, HTC Blink Feed, among others. While these tools are generally well done, they do generally miss the mark. This is evidence by the fact that people still most often use the Facebook and Twitter app rather than the Flipboard app. The general problem with these apps is that they strive too hard to be "cool" rather than be useful. For instance, the Flipboard app displays the various feeds in an artistic tile layout. This type of layout can be good for some types of user interfaces, but is not what is generally desired for reading social media.

    What is needed is a simple, clean, friendly, application which aggregates data from arbitrary social media type sources. Something that will feel familiar and easy to use, no matter what set of social media applications a user wishes to integrate. This application needs to be above all useful and intuitive in data presentation, and secondarily it needs to offer seamless ability to interface with the various features of given social networks, such as image upload or adding a friend to your contacts.

    To accomplish this goal, I propose two discrete steps. The first is the establishment of a general purpose protocol to describe social media interactions. This will be similar in concept to classical RSS, but more flexible and rich so as to allow more diverse types of information to be retrieved and more complicated interactions between client and server, such as uploading an image. With the establishment of this protocol, we will implement an front-end that will create a one stop shop for social media interaction.

    Further, this protocol could be extended to implement new meta-features operating inside existing social media applications. These meta-features will provide additionally functionality through the existing social networks. For example, crawling social media for the purposes of web archiving is currently a non-trivial task. Social media environments often rely heavily on dynamic technologies, such as JavaScript and AJAX, which are difficult to handle while crawling. This protocol could provide an easily crawl-able interface for social media, allowing trivial web archiving of social media. Another example might be the implementation of a crypto layer inside the social network. Our application could post gpg encrypted messages to an arbitrary social network, which could then be read by select users of our application who also have access to the lower level social network.

    Users of this application will no longer need to have N amount of applications in order to be connected to their friends, they will only need our application. Further we will not try to awe them with a fancy interface alone (Although our interface should be attractive.) but rather provide them with powerful meta features that they will not be able to use inside the lower level social network itself.

    The protocol we develop will be open sourced and reference implementations given to the community. The application we create will be offered for free, with either a donation option, or a payed version with additional features. Our motivation for this method of support comes from the notion that people are unwilling to purchase a new application like this without trying it first to see how useful it is.

    It is my belief that both the protocol and application built on it will be very useful to a variety of consumers. Wouldn't you like to have a free and feature rich way to interact with your social networks that also aids the open source community?