Tying things together

I’m a big fan of Social Media in general. Anything that can bring people together and help create interesting conversations has a great deal of value. I’m on Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Facebook, keep about 3 blogs besides this one, am online on about 5 different IM platforms, and I put my click-to-call in almost every email I send out. I like having conversations with people.

But for many people, Social Media is a little too much. It’s hard to keep up with all of the information. Based on the way these services are setup, it IS hard to keep up with all the different conversations. It’s hard to even explain the differences to people who aren’t already among the early adopter crowd.

So I’m starting to try and explain them as distribution methods. What does that mean exactly? These services simply assist in facilitating, recording and delivering conversations. Take Twitter for example. You can get information into and out of Twitter in several different ways (IM, Twitter clients, the Web, SMS), and you can get the information out in the same ways (plus Email). Twitter is just a service that allows you to find people and talk about things of common interest.

Much in the same way that IfByPhone makes dealing with Phone applications easier, Twitter makes dealing with delivery of messages easier.

So it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to use Twitter as a way to notify me of incoming calls. So I used IfByPhone technology and the Twitter API to post messages my Twitter account. Now when someone hits “connect” on my Click-to-call, I will get a secure, private message from Twitter saying “Inbound call from ……” Since our API (and Twitter’s) are so easy to use, the whole project took about 30 minutes (for a non-developer like me).

And if you’re the enterprising type, seeing how easy it is to integrate IfByPhone with Twitter, it’s just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from writing a snippet of code that checks inbound phone calls with your CSR database.
Interested? Let’s talk.