SocialDM

Overview

This is a quick-and-dirty primer for a new tool I’ve developed (SocialDM) where DM stands for “direct message”. The need is fairly straightforward: many services (such as FriendFeed) don’t support DM. Others do (such as Twitter). For those services that don’t, I wanted to create a simple, opt-in service that allowed people to provide an email address and then broadcast to people “you can reach me here”.

Abuse

The method of avoiding abuse is to limit the people you can receive messages from to the people you’ve chosen to subscribe to. So, if user A subscribes to user B, A can receive a message from B. If they reciprocally follow each other, they can message each other.

Sending Message

Once you’ve registered an account, people can send you messages using the web-form below. They do not have to have registered an account to do this! They can also skip the web form and shoot an email to [service]+[username]@socialdm.com (they must have a SocialDM account to do this). Right now the only supported service is “ff”. So to send me a message, someone would email ff+cubanlinks@socialdm.com. Obviously, you can do these things too, but you can only send messages to people who have SocialDM accounts. Which leads us to getting discovered.

The Service

When you register, a nice little feed gets created for you (mine is http://www.socialdm.com/feed/cubanlinks.rss). Until FriendFeed supports SocialDM as a 1st class service (soon, we hope!) you will want to add this feed to your list of FriendFeed services. Use the “Custom RSS/Atom” option:

The feed is simply a daily digest of how many DM’s you sent and received. You can see mine here. The content of this feed is pretty up-in-the-air, but that’s the current behavior.

Ok, that’s it for now! Please leave comments here or on FriendFeed. Hope you enjoy the service!