Today, while playing around with the Lovely Charts, I decided to make a quick diagram of a few social networks that I use. The purpose of the diagram is to illustrate why Twitter is here to stay. Here is the diagram itself.
As you can see, I use Twitter as a glue. It aggregates favorites, likes, shares, bookmarks, etc from all other social networks that I use. These are all gathered together and automatically published back into my own blog as ‘Day in brief’ summaries. This way, I can own most of my social activities in the space, which I actually own – my blog. So even if a social network dies out and disappears, I still have bits and pieces of content in my archives.
As for the Facebook, I don’t really use it so much myself, but a lot of people find it more convenient to follow me there than anywhere else. So I configured Twitter to forward all tweets there too. And since my WordPress blog is tweeting every post I publish, I get a very nice exposure overall.
Since Twitter is so simple and popular, pretty much every web service and social network does some sort of integration with it. It would be way more complicated to configure integration between my WordPress blog and each and every social network that I use. I’ve recently learned that quite a few people use Twitter the same way. That’s something that no other social network gives you yet. Google+ is a good potential candidate, but it still has no APIs. And Facebook could do it easily if it wasn’t for their moronic attitude towards exporting users’ own data.
P.S.: Thanks to all those people who made the social networks logos that I used in my diagram.