Thoughts on Skimmer-social media hub
Today I gave Skimmer a quick run-through. Skimmer is the social media consolidator conceived by Fallon Worldwide, the Minneapolis-based advertising agency. As a creative shop Fallon has done some nice work in print, television, and on the internet. Creating software is an interesting new direction and was worth giving the application some time and consideration.
Skimmer is really cool because it puts all of these social media sites in one place on your computer. It’s like a two-way RSS feed between your computer and your favorite social media sites, as long as your favorite sites are Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, and YouTube. I don’t doubt that they’ll expand the program to incorporate more social media sites if the application proves to be worthy of further investment.
Skimmer works well enough as a single platform to reach these different sites, but what I think is both truly clever and deeply concerning is that Fallon gets to track each user’s involvement on social media sites, including which ones and how much they interact with each. Marketers make money by understanding the behavior of large groups of people. The price you pay for this free application is that an advertising agency gets to scan your online behavior. Should we trust them?
I’m not especially concerned about Skimmer because it’s one thing to create an application and entirely another for the program to gain enough momentum that a significant population uses it. Many people will install Skimmer because it’s free but chances are it won’t be the one application you always leave running in the background. For those who do, they’ll enjoy an intimate relationship with the folks at Fallon.
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2 Responses to “Thoughts on Skimmer-social media hub”
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March 26th, 2009 @ 8:57 pm
Tim, you can run a program such as http://www.charlesproxy.com/ and view all the communications between Skimmer and the Fallon’s server. Doing so you’ll noticed that the only information being exchange with Fallon is the information to authenticate the app.
March 26th, 2009 @ 9:15 pm
Thank you for the thought and the link, Minh. I will look into it. But are you certain that no information goes to Fallon? A post on Sierra Bravo’s blog at http://blog.nerdery.com suggests that they know more than just the email address you register with.
One possibility is that they are able to gather information, at a minimum the instance of the application, through the api at the various social media sites. Does this sound plausible to you?
I fixed the typo in your post. I hope you don’t mind.
Tim