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- WTF NO CODE DROP #4
Social media is empowering.
While it’s true that you’re more likely than not to end up screaming into a void, sometimes that void will carry your message farther and wider than you’d ever anticipate.
In 2012, a few short months before I joined the then-startup Hootsuite, we were treated to a techno-optimist’s dreamscape. I’ll leave it to my friend Andy to explain –
Amidst political unrest and chaos during the Arab Spring, HootSuite became a channel of communication for Egyptian citizens. Since Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels were blocked by the Egyptian government on January 24 and 25, 2011, users quickly signed up for HootSuite to by-pass the block. HootSuite received a spike in user sign-ups during this period until the internet was blocked entirely by the Egyptian government. For a brief period, HootSuite was part of political history as a communication catalyst and vehicle to connect the global community.
There seemed to be more idealism back then.
I could yearn all day for what made up that new paradigm of social behaviours and interactions. Things change though, and everything that led up to these moments and everything that has come since all add up to learned experiences.
THE NEED
So, we already covered Aza Raskin’s contribution to our current reality but that was just one end of the spectrum. On August 23, 2007 Chris Messina invented the hashtag – something you can’t really be mad at.
The hashtag’s simplicity is probably the most impressive part of it all. It effectively inverted chat rooms; shifting discussions from being members-only to open and widely-accessible. It’s like the entire world was in one chatroom and information was indexed for our reference.
Anywho, without that we wouldn’t be able to:
harvest and curate content for social media
(WTF NO CODE DROP #3)schedule that content for publishing
pull in the URL of your published content
Like I said, things will continue to evolve and we’re actually starting to see the beginnings of a new format war between Bluesky’s AT protocol and ActivityPub, backed by the likes of Meta, Mastodon, and Tumblr.
What we’re putting together here will work with each of these protocols with a little elbow grease and some patience. For now, we’ll remain focused on the longstanding, old school social platforms but I’ll make sure to update this as I make progress on automations for the new school social media madness.
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