SocialDM

Posted: February 4th, 2009 | Author: Carter Rabasa | Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments

socdm

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.

screen cap

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:

add_service

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!

  • Hao
    Any plans for an Inbox/Sent Messages, or is that out of the scope for this service?
  • You know, I hadn't thought about that. I'm sort of a security nut, and I
    try not to store any more information than I need to. Most of my
    applications are pass-through apps, and store very little state. But I'll
    think about it. You have to give the people what they want. :)
  • Hao
    Maybe a temporary solution would be to have an option to "subscribe to sent DMs", so at least I would have a record of Sent Messages in my email inbox. Could be opt-in to make it less intrusive.
  • Interesting idea. Any particular reason you want a log of your sent
    messages? I almost never refer to my sent DM's in Twitter.
  • Hao
    Sometimes I forget the context of what the DM was about, especially after a long, drawn out DM convo, it's nice to look back and see log of prev msgs (ie. facebook messaging, iphone SMS [great usability, although they combine msgs, instead of inbox vs. sent]).
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