Sunday, August 14, 2011

Insight on a social feed aggregator

From where I see, a social aggregator should be simple enough for even a fool to understand. I don't know why most of the social feed aggregators find it so difficult to be simple.

I am not a programmer, but, if I were, I would design a website described as follows:
A simple blue bar on the top of the page. Name of the webpage, and tabs:

[Social] [Feeds] [WALL] [Mail] [Contacts] [Find] along with a search box (nice, square). Additional services would include NEWS, Forum, etc.

In the social tab, would be a thin column to the left stating the services you use like FB, Twitter, Buzz, GTalk, blogger, wordpress, diigo, Stumbleupon, and others; each with number of updates in red text.

Subtopics would be there too, such as:

Posts on walls: what other friends are posting on each others' walls.
Mentions:Fb and Tw.
Retweets, reposts, FB shares
Comments fb, forums, blog
Replies:Fb, twitter, Forums, YouT ,
Status updates,  FB, Tw, Goog, and wherever user has to update.
Links, FB, Tw, Stumble, Diigo, digg, etc
Ppictures, FB, Tw, Picasa, Flicr,
TEXT, FB notes, Blog, forum posts, Documents, how tos, wiki, books
Clicking on any name would open their respective contacts page
Groups: would include updates from your groups.

In Feeds tab, feeds from various selected services would be shown. Such as lifehacker, gizmag, Smashing magazine, and the like.

In WALL, Options to manage personal feeds would be there. Options to post to FB, twitter, blogger, wordpress, mil, SMS, email, messages and most of the services used would be there. along with a timeline view. Indicators would indicate the most neglected services and the most used too.

In mail, various email services  would be shown in a nice and simple layout along with your FB messages. In a timeline view with a few but intuitive buttons. Subtopics would include various services and their subfolders.

Contacts page would give a combined dossier of a person. Info would be collected from various services they use. Option to mail, message, write on wall would be there. Features to merge, add, manage, group contacts would be there.

Find would be used to provide random data like random blog posts, people. suggestions. Along with a search box. An extensive search protocol must be built in spanning through status updates, news, blogs, notes, etc.

All communications must be encrypted, because the info is pretty important. All data must be transferred using HTTPS protocol because that is one protocol that is used pretty much everywhere. And all the data, including mail, updates would have an option of local storage. By this I mean a desktop app which stores everything locally, thus reducing the burden on its own servers. (At least mail).

Anyone trying to design such a system must pay attention to design such that minimum number of mouse clicks are required to access data of choice.

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