There would be great interest in creating a way to automate time-consuming tasks on specific sites. I realize these would each be individual apps; however, they could be similar to each other and some sites would be willing to promote your app to their members. Here are some examples to convey what I mean:
FriendFeed allows you to follow "friends" from other Social Networking services by going to
Friends Search and selecting a service. It finds the users there that also have FriendFeed accounts and allows you to mass add them. Unfortunately they removed the option to subscribe to all those who subscribe to you so now you have to add them ONE at a TIME! Jeesh. (For a while you could select all and subscribe all.) I wonder if that could be automated.
If someone could find a way to sync all your friends/followers/subscribers across Social Networks that would be awesome. I would settle for a way to follow/friend/subscribe everyone at X Social Network who follows me at Y Social Network. And it isn't just Social Networking sites. There are so many communities now on all kinds of sites including blog & RSS directories like Technorati and MyBlogLog, Local Search communities like Yelp and Merchant Circle, and blog communities built at Ning and elsewhere. We have this challenge across them all.
What about an app that finds and follows the blogs and bloggers whose Avatars appear in a MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog or Blogged Widget? Beyond that we need to automate following those who follow us on all those sites. Yes, I know doing it manually is more Social but there are only so many hours in a day and there are hundreds if not thousands of sites that are beneficial to bloggers and online businesses.
Blog directories like
Blogged.com allow following individuals and blogs. Instead of manually visiting and following each person who follows you would it possible to write an app that could follow anyone who follows you automatically? Would you need to manually log into the site and run it or could it run without you doing that? Could you also have it follow the blogs of anyone who is following you?
Individual Social Networking acccounts such as my
GrowMap StumbleUpon account allow others to subscribe to you. Is it possible to write an app that will subscribe to them for you?
Perhaps even better, when you use su.pr to share posts at Twitter the provide stats for individual posts. If you look at the
stats on one of my posts in the lower right corner su.pr shows all the StumbleUpon users who liked that post. It would be great if you could run an app that would subscribe to those who liked your post.
There are simply not enough hours in the day to reciprocate on even the major sites much less all the others. Most don't realize there are over 500 blog directories alone and dozens of Social Networking sites. Anything that speeds up the process would be in demand by at least the power users - and more and more businesses need to learn to BE power users. Feel free to contact me for additional details or to collaborate. FriendFeed is a good place to discuss complex issues.
