Social network interaction flowchart
2009 has brought many waves of connectedness between social networking websites and even content websites, such as the New York Times and the Huffington Post, which want to tap into the influence social networks have. An example of the former is YouTube with their Autoshare feature, allowing one to automatically publish to Facebook, Twitter, et al. the videos which one comments on, rates, favorites, or uploads. Similarly, Digg uses Facebook Connect for new account creation and also features publishing to Facebook. FriendFeed, recently acquired by Facebook, aggregates virtually all user-generated content on social networking websites and optionally publishes this material to Facebook or Twitter.
As the features have been rolled out by each party, I, being a fervent lover of all things alpha and beta, have usually adopted the new things available to me. The result has been a strange, built-up web of interactions between the websites I am active on and, in some (unfortunate) cases, feedback loops which ooze duplicate postings.
I decided to attempt to visualize the aforementioned interactions; the flowchart at the top of the post is the finished product. It’s not efficient, it’s ugly, and it needs some help. I think the best way to go about it is to rearrange the flow like so (in other words, to create a hierarchy):
Revised social network interaction flowchart