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.

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