Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Fallon's Skimmer - Cool app to keep up with your social networks

Today, Fallon launched Skimmer, an Adobe AIR application "designed to streamline, beautify, and enhance the experience of participating in your most frequently used social networking activities." Skimmer streams Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger onto one desktop dashboard. This feed content can be filtered by service, by group, or by keyword. In addition, you have the ability upload pictures and videos to Flickr and Youtube.



I immediately downloaded it to see what I thought. I have to say it did make things a lot easier. I could easily follow what was going on with all my friends on Facebook and Twitter, as well as any blog updates. For me, the only downside was that it got a bit overwhelming since I hadn't grouped my friends yet.

Apparently, (via Creativity Online) the app has launched in conjunction with Fallon's new corporate Web site — employees’ social media activity will be published via Skimmer within Fallon.com. In some ways, I see this as the next step in the evolution of agency sites from the traditional to a site like Modernista's where a floating menu bar that superimposes its logo and a small clickable menu over the top of whatever referring page you clicked from to Fallon's where all employees' social media activity is openly published on the site. While I think this is an interesting idea, I wonder how much monitoring it will take as employees come and go and if it will force employees to be much more private since their whole lives are now fully connected to their employer.

1 comment:

Chris Wiggins said...

Hi Tuffy,

Thanks for the writeup. As far as the 'we are fallon' section of the site where employees social activity is freely visible, I'll let you in on a secret. The fallon version of the app has a (pre-checked) fallon.com button for all posting/uploading dialogs so any time a user prefers that a post not show up on the corporate site, they can still use skimmer to post it and it will only show up on the service. That's done wonders to make people feel comfortable with the idea.

Again, thanks for the writeup and for trying it out.