Re: [Gimp-web] Social media: consolidation of comments

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 3:20 PM, Sven Claussner wrote:

> Having to check and search many posts on FB, G+, Twitter,
> mailing lists and forums is a tedious work which easily
> gets neglected, especially when you as a coder just want
> to code your idea that seems so wonderful. Thus many
> chances are wasted.

???

People have different roles in this project. Programmers don't
habitually check social media for feedback, and schumaml, patdavid,
and me -- people who check social media and maintain accounts -- don't
write GIMP code.

> I thought about some possibilities:
> - Access Facebook, Twitter through their APIs.

Facebook doesn't have an API.

> - Forums: there are many GIMP forums around there in various languages
> and therefore I doubt setting up and maintaining yet another one would
> be a big benefit. But getting their latest news through RSS/Atom
> feeds could be a help.

I'll be blunt here. As someone who follows these forums I'm not sure
what kind of insights you expect, given how their use of GIMP differs
from what we design the software for (in 95% of cases or so).

> - Uservoice,

https://www.uservoice.com/plans/customer-support/

All these services are commercial for anything more than a casual
interest. They also require an employee with full-time occupation to
sit in front of the control panel and move feedback between feedback
platform and bugzilla. Moreover, they would change our relationship
into the customer-developer kind, while we are not actually getting
paid for working on GIMP.

Personally, as much as I want communication transparency,
user-friendliness, and professional-grade everything, I think we
should not forget that GIMP is a community project by volunteers. This
isn't a business.

> Flickr

You mean the GIMP users group?

> Instagram

Actionable feedback on Instagram? You must be joking :)

> Pinterest

Likewise

> Disqus

How is it related?

> blogs

That could bring something useful.

> and professional press reviews could be other ways of getting feedback.

Professional press reviews? Could you elaborate please?

> - There is a social monitoring meta search on the web:
> www.socialmention.com

Which is pretty much useless.

> It would be a great help if all this feedback was in one place
> and we could search it by topic easily

Implementing this is _incredibly_ expensive in terms of both money and
human resources if you want it to be any useful any time soon.

See, I work for a company that provides a social media monitoring
service. Accumulating this kind of information means:

- you pay for a server (or several servers) -- a lot;
- you pay for the traffic -- a lot;
- you need clever linguistic algorithms to sift through the data and
categorize it;
- you need clever algorithms that will detect spam in social media
posts and remove those;
- you need to design a query language, with negative words etc., to
build sensible queries;
- you need someone who maintains all this;
- etc. etc. etc.

Would it be useful for the team? I guess so. Is it realistic? Probably not.

Alex