.Dust

In the I have tested pretty much any Social Net­work­ing dek­top client appli­ca­tion out there, but I have never been able to find the per­fect solu­tion to my needs.

As a com­pro­mise I ended up using Tweetie to man­age Twit­ter, Thwirl for Friend­Feed and a few tabs in the browser for other things like Face­book and Buzz.

There are at least five impor­tant things I would like to see in the per­fect Social Net­work­ing desk­top client:

1 — Sup­port for every Social Net­work­ing ser­vice I use.

There are dozens of desk­top clients sup­port­ing Twit­ter, a few sup­port­ing Friend­Feed and Face­book and very few with sup­port for all of the oth­ers (e.g. Flickr). I would like to see all of these in one sin­gle client with­out the need to launch a bunch of appli­ca­tions when I fire up my computer.

Actu­ally every sin­gle social net­work you are going to add to your desk­top client is adding one layer of com­plex­ity in your appli­ca­tion that you will need to man­age. APIs change, some­times very fast, social net­works are given birth every sin­gle day and so on.

At least you, as a devel­oper, should focus on the most pop­u­lar and give the option to write plu­g­ins or add ons for others.

2 — Aggre­gate conversations

This the most impor­tant thing I would like to see in my client.

I mainly use Friend­Feed as my entry point to all of the oth­ers social net­works. As soon as I share some­thing on Friend­Feed it auto­mat­i­cally posts the very same thing on Twit­ter and Face­book is pick­ing up my Twit­ter stream an pub­lishes it.

If I look at my audi­ence on Twit­ter, Friend­Feed and Face­book I can notice that they do not over­lap so much.

What actu­ally hap­pens is that peo­ple start com­ment­ing, lik­ing, shar­ing on each sin­gle Social Net­work and I have no option to see the con­ver­sa­tion started from one sin­gle post in one unique place.

After I have posted some­thing on Friend­Feed I would like my desk­top client to track the con­ver­sa­tion on that item on all of my social net­works, aggre­gate it, and present it to me in one unique item in my client.

I think there may be some nice infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques that you may use to dis­play this information.

3 — Give the option to store con­tacts locally and merge them.

I would like to keep track of my con­tacts on the dif­fer­ent social net­works locally and have the abil­ity to merge dif­fer­ent iden­ti­ties in one sin­gle contact.

With this fea­ture I would be able to check instantly what one con­tact is shar­ing on every social net­work and what comes in terms of con­ver­sa­tion on the subject.

4 — Locally man­aged lists

I would like to have the options of cre­at­ing local lists pick­ing con­tacts from dif­fer­ent social net­work and see at the con­ver­sa­tions going on on that list.

That would help me min­i­mize the noise when I have few time to spend at look­ing at what’s going on.

5 — Advanced filters

Reduc­ing noise is prob­a­bly one of the fea­tures that I would use the most.

I would like to have the option to dis­card all those items con­tain­ing a defined set of words or sen­tences. At the sames time I would like to have the option to see only those items con­tain­ing another set of words or sentences.

6 — Aggre­gate sim­i­lar content

If some­one shares a link and my desk­top client finds out that other con­tacts are shar­ing the same item I would like to see the con­ver­sa­tion aggre­gated in one sin­gle item. At the end of the day every­body is talk­ing about the same subject.

7 — Uni­fied search

When I per­form a search I would like the search to be extended on all of the social networks.

Finally all of this should be packed into a “lick­able” User Inter­face with a great User Experience.

Related posts:

1. UXcon­fer­ence 2009 — UX and Social Networks
2. The Part And The Whole, Or Why You Should Bother About Social Web.
3. The per­fect mobile e-​mail application
4. Too Much Social
5. What If Thieves Were Social Too?