Introducing Hashlinks: Build Networks of Social Networks
Happy New Year 2012!
To kick off the new year, we’re excited to rollout an innovation we believe will fundamentally enhance the way groups communicate. Complex organizations like schools often have many disparate cells (our word for groups), some for classrooms, parent alerts, sports teams, etc. Today Celly introduces a way to let you link multiple cells together with hashtags forming a network of cells—a social matrix.
The technology enabling cell-to-cell federation is a new social sharing innovation we call Hashlinks. Hashlinks link two cells together by a hashtag. They enable members in different cells to broadcast messages to each other. When a message with a specified hashtag is sent to one cell, Celly will also broadcast the message to the linked cell. For example, one cell called @school1 can be linked to another cell @school2 by agreed upon hashtags like #event. When a message with #event is sent to @school1, it will also be broadcast to @school2.
Message flow enabled by hashlinks can be outgoing, incoming, or bi-directional. To establish hashlinks between cells, the administrators of the cells must approve the hashlink relationship.
A @schooldistrict cell could use hashlinks to form a realtime communication network with all schools in the district. In this way, events and alerts like school cancellations could be routed automatically and efficiently from @schooldistrict to each of the schools in the district:
Bi-directional hashlinks between the schools and district could enable schools to inform the district of particular events like campus emergencies that could then be routed to neighboring schools.
It’s easy to create a hashlink. The administrator of the cell just needs to click the “add hashlink” button on the cell’s web page. Then a dialog box appears that lets the administrator define the hashlink. This definition includes three items: the target cell for the hashlink, the message flow direction, and the hashtag:
Give hashlinks a spin and let us know what you think. We think hashlinks will open up new ways for organizations to share information with other organizations, encouraging loosely-coupled workflows and ad-hoc user hashlink vocabularies aka folksonomies.
Thanks for using Celly and for your ideas about how we can improve our service.
Stay tuned for more innovations in 2012!
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