Thing 8-Social Media Management

Hello, hello!  We're back again with social media management tools!  The idea with these tools is that you can input all your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on) and it will allow you to manage (post, view updates, etc.) all of them simultaneously as opposed to having to log into each social media site separately. 

For this app I chose to use Cloze, as I liked its concept most and it seemed most relevant to me.  One of their slogans is “With Cloze people come first, everything else is secondary.” That said, their main feature is that the app prowls through your email and social media accounts to find out who you interact with most.  It assigns your friends and contacts a closeness score, and puts those with the higher scores at the top of the pile.  That means that when you log into Cloze, your contacts with high scores will have their posts, pictures, emails etc. visible to you first, as opposed to a date/time order. 

It sounded good, but didn't pan out so well in reality.  The app did have an in-app walk through that came up the first time I signed in, but it was very brief and after it was over I still had no clue what to do or what was what!  I found some more information online, and evenutally got used to playing with Cloze.  However, as it turns out, I'm really not a fan of the main concept of the app. 

The "key people" only feeds were just sort of repetitive, and not really that targeted to me.  For example, a "key person's" friend has a birthday and they wish them a happy birthday on Facebook.  That post wishing them a happy birthday then shows up in my feed, even though I am not mutual friends with the birthday boy/girl.  Such a post as that one is not really relevant to me, and a waste of screen space.  Plus, I realized I like seeing the random posts/tweets/whatever from people I vaguely know, as well as from my loved ones!  I'd rather just scroll all the way through my Facebook feed, and my email, and my Tweets and see everything. 

Beyond my general dislike of the concept (which sounded good on paper but just didn't work out for me), the app also has some strange quirks.  For instance-I frequently send myself email reminders-links to check up on later, a reminder to get a piece of mail out in the morning, etc.  So, I popped up as an important person on my Cloze news feed, meaning I saw all my own tweets, posts, emails, updates, and the like on my feed.  This was redundant and a waste of feed space, and I couldn't figure out a way to completely delete myself as a "key person" (perhaps it can be done, but not intuitively). 

Overall, I'm just not a fan of this one.  Its a good concept, and would probably work very well for some people, but just not for me!  You win some, you lose some!