OhNoVation: How to NOT Fear The Dark Side of Innovation

I hate it when that happens. ;-0

In a comment there, I overstated something. I said we wasted 168 man-hours trying to get oAuth2 working on LinkedIn. 

No, we wasted 18 man-hours to that point, and 21 overall.  

Sorry, it was a big-fingers-little-keyboard thing.

That's still ridiculous. The fault for that lies partly with us and partly with LinkedIn. 

Any project, new product, or new feature has a PH Factor

I don't mean PH as in the measure of acidity/alkalinity. 

I mean PH as in "Poop Happens."

Sometimes the poop is a good thing. The innovation you started working on leads to a bigger, better one.

Viagra did not start out as a boner pill. 

It was originally meant to improve blood circulation without the crazy side effects of existing drugs. Its current use was an unexpected side effect. 

Happily, for Pfizer, more people want regular boners than healthy hearts.

Go figure.

Rogaine was a blood pressure medicine. 

It too had a more marketable side effect, it grew hair. Again, more people want a full head of hair than normal blood pressure.

Maybe we should create Viagaine so we could have boners to put our new-found full head of hair to good use?

Possible (probable?) Fake News alert

Rumor has it that Sucralose was discovered by auto-correct. This may well be fake-news. I have no way to confirm it. I don't care. I find it poetic enough to repeat here.

As the story goes, a researcher texted, "The samples are ready," to his boss. She meant to reply, "Test them," which was auto-corrected to, "Taste them." 

He did and found one sample incredibly sweet. 

The best, safest, heat-stable artificial sweetener was thus born.

The story doesn't say what they were really looking for, but artificial sweetening is a Big Market, one the  Big Sugar Lobby has been trying to kill forever.

Hum, maybe Viagainose for skinny guys with full heads of hair and indefatigable boners? 

Which brings us back to the LinkedIn thing on myTweetPack

At least, sort of. myTweetPack has nothing to do with skinny guys with full heads of hair and indefatigable boners. 

Bear with me.

We already mine LinkedIn for articles to auto-load and auto-tweet. That's considerably more complicated. I thought the oAuth2.0 would be a breeze. 

Turns out it was.

We "wasted" 21 man-hours on a simple thing. In reality, it was working within 2 hours. We just didn't know it. Four people read LinkedIn documentation the same (wrong) way. We were expected a 127 character token when the real length was 179. 

It didn't fit into the database space allotted so it never wrote.  

In our defense, 179 characters of gibberish look much like 127 characters of gibberish, just longer.

Oy

Our headaches didn't stop there. We moved on to coding the automatic updates. 

That's when a strange thing happened.

IFTTT, Zappier, etc can write a status update to a connected LinkedIn account. There's even a published applet on IFTTT that was written by LinkedIn. 

Ergo, the ability to write a status update must be in LinkedIn's API. 

It's not.

More accurately, it's not in the Public API. Maybe it's in the exorbitantly priced Premium API. 

I'm not about to find out. 

Cross-Posting to LinkedIn et al will stay with IFTTT.

All is not lost, though, dear myTweetPack members. I did find several published applets that do the trick. Somebody over there must have been reading my Twitter posts. That means all a member needs to do is open a free IFTTT account, connect the platforms (one-click) and activate the published applets. 

That just needs to be done once. 

Here they are:

Cross-Post to LinkedIn when you Tweet using #LI: https://ifttt.com/applets/Ms3CGPS2-automatically-post-your-tweets-on-linkedin-when-you-tag-then-with-li

Cross-Post to FaceBook Page when you Tweet with #fb: https://ifttt.com/applets/114281p-tweet-with-fb-to-facebook-page

Cross-Post to FaceBook when you Tweet with your choice of hashtags (may as well use #fb and kill two birds with one stone): https://ifttt.com/applets/31985538d-post-your-tweet-on-facebook-by-including-a-specific-hashtag

I'll even help walk you through it if you have issues. Look me up on the Live Chat.

Did We Waste 21 man-hours?

No. 

I was sure we were missing something, so I dug into the LinkedIn API. Most of LinkedIn's API calls pull in information. Few actually write information. In fact, the only stuff that even remotely resembles a status update is a share. You don't need the API for that. A simple web link will do it. 

Here's an example, Click this link to share Javi's post to LinkedIn. 

So WTF is LinkedIn's API good for?

It's pretty good for mining actionable data from LinkedIn's 450,000,000 CVs and untold oodles of Company Pages.

Imagine a sales rep mining a company page for contacts and actions. That might help him/her figure out who is the key contact. Looking back to my Sales/Sales Management days, how many blind alleys do reps run down pitching to the wrong person?

Imagine mining your competitors for news, new products, and expansion/workforce trimming.

Imagine mining profiles for specific actions, achievements, positions, or skillsets.

Imagine beBee mining profiles to find writers of more than X posts.

Imagine publishers mining profiles for writers.

Imagine writers mining profiles for publishers.

Imagine <fill in whatever here>.mining <"profiles" or "company pages"> for <whatever>.

Just imagine . . . The possibilities abound. Sales people, marketers, product developers, and yes, even recruiters would benefit. 

Heck, I may even be able to use it to further target potential follows on myTweetPack.

LinkedIn is a repository of business people's history. It's worth a good long look. Maybe this Big Goof may spawn myLinkPack, or LinkedIntelligence or whatever.

That's the good thing about pushing for innovation. 

Sometimes you end up somewhere else, somewhere you didn't expect. 

Somewhere better?

Who knows? Maybe we have another Viagra or Rogaine here.

Time will tell.

Cheers