Topic on Talk:Social media/Flow

This is for brainstorming how we can use app.net. app.net allows 256 characters, which allows a little more flexibility, as well as images and videos (through oEmbed). Actually arbitrary annotations (metadata) can be used, but of course viewers will probably not support more obscure ones.

Another advantage of app.net is that there is currently a significant contingent of early adopters and developers, exactly the people who might be willing to contribute to MediaWiki.

This post was posted by Mattflaschen, but signed as Superm401.

Very good, and thank you for your offer to help spreading MediaWiki news. I'm not a user of app.net so please bare with my basic questions. The first one: how should we start? Is the first step creating a new (paid) account or is there a concept like a "page" handled by an account, like Facebook and Google+ have?

The next step would be to create the MediaWiki place. For that you could use media:Mediawiki logo reworked 2.svg and the description used at https://twitter.com/MediaWiki

Then for posting we could start with the simplest: follow any of the MediaWiki social channels and just re-post in app.net. By default we use exactly the same text everywhere, however a sometimes Facebook/Google+ get a bit more extended text if an important detail didn't fit in the 140 chars of identi.ca/twitter.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Yes, there are just accounts, not separate pages. It sounds like one option is to start by reposting from Facebook, since that isn't limited to 140. We need to figure out what to do if it exceeds 256, though.

This post was posted by Mattflaschen, but signed as Superm401.

So this means that someone has to pay for creating an account... I read somewhere that there was a promotion for existing users to bring someone in for free. Maybe you want to start with that? Then we can see in future months whether it's worth or not.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Yes, I can invite the account and do a one-month free trial. I'll wait until I've decided how to do the reposting.

This post was posted by Mattflaschen, but signed as Superm401.

They've switched to a freemium model (there is a limit to the number of people you can follow, but not the number who can follow you). I've signed up as @mediawiki and made a couple posts, based on the identi.ca feed. Going forward, I am planning to use this flow ( have the accounts hooked up):

Identi.ca->Yahoo Pipes->IFTTT->Buffer

Yahoo Pipes lets me remove the mediawiki: prefix from the identi.ca RSS feed. Then, IFTTT posts it to Buffer. Once I'm confident it's working correctly, I can set Buffer to automatically post, while still being able to go in and tweak the text manually while it's still in the buffer.

However, we can replace this flow if we come up with something better.

This post was posted by Mattflaschen, but signed as Superm401.

Great! Can you please add the app.net details to the Social media page? Also note that for the rest of channels we are using this logo.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

I've updated both.

This post was posted by Mattflaschen, but signed as Superm401.