Right from the very beginning of Social Hiking, the site was designed to be as flexible as possible in how media accounts are linked. The site was originally built for a charity walk involving two hikers – and I wanted both of our Twitter and Twitpic accounts to be linked to the same map.
Social Hiking treats each media account linked to the site as a separate entity – your twitter feed is separate to your twitter photos for example. This has two clear advantages:
Firstly it gives you massive flexibility – you can link multiple accounts of the same type, so for example you can link your twitter account (with your hashtag) and the twitter account of your friends or partner who you regularly walk with (with their hashtags), you can include your twitpic photos without including the related tweet (by not including your hashtag in the description), or you could include some twitter photos without also including the tweet (by using different hashtags).
The second advantage is that each media type is nicely classified – Twitter photos are treated in the same way as other photo accounts (for example Flickr, Picasa etc), whereas the same tweet, added via your linked Twitter account, is treated in a different way (as a tweet, with the potential to have threaded conversations displayed).
The disadvantage is that it is more complicated – for Twitter in particular, you need to add a linked account separately for tweets, your mentions, twitter photos and twitpics. This is also probably not what a user would expect – surely if you link a Twitter account, you should also get the mentions and photos without more steps?!
Having flexibility is important and classifying media has some great uses that you will see in future updates, however I have just rolled out a modification that should make the process of linking accounts related to Twitter much easier.
From now on, when you add a new Twitter account to link (or edit an existing one), you will have the option to also create linked accounts for related media like threaded conversations (if the Twitter account is your own), Twitter photos, Twitpic and Twitgoo – simply select the accounts you want to add and the site will automatically create the necessary accounts.
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