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Madgex’s Twitter/Social Graph api mashup

7 Sep

Recently I attended dConstruct where I met Nick Morley, CTO of Madgex. As part of their ‘Ideas and Learning’ time the staff use 15% of their working time to play with code and come up with ideas. So their recent idea project was their dconstruct bubbler (Twitter/dContruct Network Visual Projection).

I found this fascinating for 2 reasons:

1. The collaborative use of many different social media platforms (including API’s) across: Twitter, dConstruct back network, Google Social Graph API and a Madgex mashup API.
2. I see a potential business opportunity here – with some creative thought I think their idea can be monetised in the industry I work in.

So, how does it work?

Registrants to the dConstruct conference register themselves on the dConstruct backnetwork where registrant provide their twitter usernames (not passwords) blog urls.

This blog URL is then pulled from the Backnetwork API by the bubbler and passed through the Google Social API to try and find the delegates Twitter account, if found any tweets are included in the Bubbler’s display.

Using the Google Social Graph and Twitter API’s, Madgex creates a mashup of data, which is then mashed and fed onto a 52″ screen as vector-based graphics.

Madgex has created an open source area found at lab.madgex.com

Jumping on the social media bandwagon

2 Sep

Social media is everywhere… not more so than in the enterprise environment. Lets face it senior marketers and digital managers need to be involved (or seen to be involved). If you’re thinking about it it’s already too late.

While there’s nothing wrong with engaging your business in a social media soup (Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Ning, Upcoming, YouTube, Del.icio.us, etc..), I can’t help wonder how these managers are forgetting that social media integration must form part of a structured content strategy. Successful social media efforts cannot simply be added on to existing products and expect to work perfectly.

Evan Gerber recently wrote and article, Is your brand at social media’s ground zero? where he expresses his concern over brand neglect through badly planned project goals:

Like many other business ventures, a successful social networking campaign revolves around using good information to drive smart decisions. Gather qualitative and quantitative information and then use it to define project goals. An ill-defined project is substantially less likely to succeed.

Ever heard “It looks cool, just put it in the website“, “find somewhere to put it!” or “Just plug it in!“? A common knee-jerk response by many digital managers is to jump on the bandwagon and simply plug these easily-malleable platforms into their websites. Enterprise has been left behind and now needs to catch up. More and more senior stakeholders feel left behind. So, their immediate reactive response is add add add. Everyone’s talking about it so it should be good, shouldn’t it?

Carefully integrated social media efforts can hugely benefit a brand and generate a buzz.

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