Using Third Party Social Media Apps for Personal Use – Is It Worth It?
Should you stick to original social media sites or use the third party apps created for them? Consider the issues of innovation as well as personal experience when making your decision.
When you want to update your status on Twitter do you log in directly to the Twitter site? Or do you instead access Twitter through a third party app such as Tweetdeck or Ubersocial? With sites like Twitter trying to crack down on third party apps there is a question of whether or not these apps are worth it for people who are just using social media for personal use and not as part of a specific business strategy.
Twitter and Third Party Apps
Although there are third party apps created for all different social media sites, Twitter has really come to attention around this issue. This is because of the fact that the social media giant recently tried to stop developers from creating any new third party apps for Twitter.
BBC News reports that Twitter’s stated purpose in this was to encourage innovation in the use of Twitter. The site wants people to use official Twitter apps when they want the true Twitter experience rather than using third party apps that simply replicate that experience. They want to encourage the development of programs that create “novel services such as FourSquare which use the information in Tweets for other ends.”
There has been a lot of backlash from developers who say that this isn’t Twitter’s aim at all. They say that Twitter essentially rode to success on the backs of third party developers and want to kick them to the curb now that they have learned from the mistakes and successes of these other businesses. The Twitter site itself has definitely incorporated many of the favorite features of third party sites (like easy one-click RTs), which supports this argument.
So the question becomes whether using third party apps for social media actually stunts innovation or supports it.
Choose Apps that Encourage Innovation
Most users will want to encourage innovation in the tech industry. Twitter has a point that utilizing a third party app that just replicates the experience of using Twitter isn’t encouraging innovation but instead is supporting what are essentially copycat sites. This assumes, however, that the functions on Twitter come first and the apps that replicate them come after (and copy the site itself). This often isn’t the case.
Taking all of this into consideration, we should each perhaps make more of an effort to think carefully about the third party apps that we do choose to use. Seek out those apps that are truly offering you something that the Twitter site itself doesn’t offer to you. Those are the apps where innovation occurs. Innovation is what changes our world.
For example, TweetDeck currently offers automatic shortening of URLs as well as an option to easily create an update longer than 140 characters using their deck.ly tool. At the time of this writing Twitter doesn’t offer those features on the site. This makes TweetDeck innovative. Even if Twitter eventually adopts these things (as it has adopted other TweetDeck features in the past) this is a good indication that TweetDeck will continue to push the envelope as a third party social media client.
Consider the Personal Experience
Although making an effort to encourage innovation through your choice of third party apps is important, you also want to focus on what your personal experience is when using third party apps. For example, maybe Snaptu (a third party Twitter app) doesn’t feel particularly innovative to you but it operates more quickly and smoothly on your smartphone than any official Twitter app does. That alone might be a reason to use it.
Another reason that people may use third party social media apps is because they want to streamline their social media activity. For example, people choose to use Echofon because it syncs their Tweets and Facebook posts between all of their devices so that they don’t have to re-read updates each time they log in on another device. And some people use TweetDeck because it allows them to go to one spot to look at updates from multiple Twitter accounts as well as accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare, MySpace and Google Buzz. You may not care about innovation but if you care about having a more efficient social media experience then third party apps might make sense for you.
Mashable reports that 42 percent of tweets are coming from third party apps. Clearly there is a reason for this. If the reason is because those apps are innovative or simple because they offer a better user experience then official Twitter apps then why not use them?
How do you update your social media accounts?
About the Author: Caleb Blackham is a freelance writer for Adobe FormsCentral. FormsCentral is an online form builder where users can put their web forms and surveys in front of people on their device of choice.
