Reflection (Week 9)- Consolidating Social Media Sites

Do you find yourself jumping from one social media account to another just show the same picture to all of your followers?  Do you feel like you have too many social media accounts?  Do you find yourself scouring through all of your social media accounts for that one post you read a month ago?  There may actually be some help for you!  This week I learned about two different sites that help people consolidate their multiple social accounts.  These two sites are called Hootsuite and Storify and they can connect themselves to all of your social media accounts.

Hootsuite is a site that allows you to connect all of your social media accounts to a single site.  From this site you can post status updates, pictures, and videos without having to log in and log out of every single site.  Furthermore, you can also read all of the comments that you have received on each site while visiting just one place.  Furthermore, you can actually write something and schedule it to be posted in the future.  It sounds pretty convenient to have everything consolidated into one common site.  It can make a person feel like they are sitting in the cockpit of a gigantic ship!  However, the one thing downfall of this Hootsuite is that if someone were to hack into your account, they could do a lot of damage and have access to an incredible amount of information.  I have not taken a deep look into the security system of Hootsuite so I am still a bit insecure about using this service with so much at risk.  That being said, Chester (our Hootsuite host) seems to trust Hootsuite's security and uses it quite often.  Perhaps, in time I may soon find myself controlling all of my social media accounts from Hootsuite as well.

Storify is a site that allows you to connect all of your social media accounts to a single site, look for posts that interest you, and compile those posts into a presentation that tells a story.  It is amazing how simple this program is to use and how much information can be recovered from the newsfeeds of a single person's Facebook, Twitter, and other connecting sites.  I have never used Storify before but it can definitely be used as a fun tool to search for and compile information.  Wild Things, my project group, tweeted out our notes and reactions to some articles and videos that we read and were able to find similar tweets from people in other groups.  Combining and organizing those tweets allowed us to actually create a cohesive and informative story about the article and videos we learned from.  I am excited to use this tool again in the future, especially to record the reactions of people after poignant events.  Again though, I am worried about the fact that Storify has access to ever social media site because if my account ever gets hacked, the hacker would have a treasure chest of information on my contacts and I.

Hootsuite and Storify are definitely two interesting sites.  I am very interested in working more with them.  I would like to do some more research into their security system and find out how many times, if ever, they were hacked in the past.  However, I can foresee more and more people wanting to consolidate their social media sites which will eventually raise the demand for these sites but also enlarge the target on them for hackers.