When you’re trying to maximize your social media efforts one of the big challenges is to minimize the amount of labor involved in keeping all of the services you’re driving updated.
Sure, there are so very pricey services out there that can handle a lot of the load and, if cost is an issue (and who isn’t it an issue for?), you could build your own tools … which sounds good but isn’t .. there’s so much to learn in creating and operating your own social media management tools it really is equally expensive.
In the middle ground are services such as my focus today: Tarpipe, an online, Web-interfaced workflow system for social media content publishing.
Once you’ve signed up with Tarpipe you provide the login details for the various social media accounts you use including social networking sites (Facebook and Plaxo), microblogging services (Friendfeed, Twitter, Google Buzz, Plurk, and identi.ca), picture sharing services (23hq, Flikr, Photobucket, Pikeo, and TwitPic), Bookmarking services (del.icio.us, Diigo, Pinboard, and Zootool), blogs (Tumblr and WordPress), as well as Dropbox, Evernote, bit.ly, Convore, and Twilio.
At its simplest, Tarpipe will provide what is effectively a poor man’s version of Ping.fm; you fill out a form with your subject, content and an optional link, click on which services the content should be sent to and to post your content Tarpipe either fakes your interaction with the services or uses the services’ APIs.
Tarpipe logs all of your postings, recording both successes and failures, provides a public page for your activities, and allows you to re-run your postings from the workflow page.
Where this service gets sexy is in allowing you to email to a private mailbox for each workflow you design and send the message contents to selected services. But wait! It gets better! You can actually create programmatic “flows” to manipulate content to create social media updates. You do this within Tarpipe using the visual editor (a nice piece of engineering which is rather like the Yahoo Pipes editor). For more complex workflows Tarpipe also provides an API with Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby libraries built by third parties.
Free accounts are allowed one workflow with up to two destinations and use 100 requests per month. Premium accounts, which allow for items to be pulled by the Tarpipe service from RSS feeds start at $4.90 per month for two workflows with up to four destinations and up to 1,000 items read from feeds per month. The top level of service at $14.95 per month allows for unlimited requests per month with unlimited destinations, unlimited workflows, and up to 3,000 feed items per month.
Tarpipe could do with better user interface organization and better explanations of how it works its magic as well as how to use it but then again, once you play with the service and dig in to what it offers, I think you’ll be impressed. It is, in fact, easier to use than Yahoo Pipes, offers automatic operation (which Pipes doesn’t), and is far more powerful than, say, Ping.fm. If you have a need to have some kind of workflow involved in updating your social media services, Tarpipe is definitely worth looking at.
