Partner news: Changes to Flowtown API

• Posted December 1st, 2010
• By Pamela O'Hara (bio)
• Filed under: Partners, small business web, Social Media, Technology

We learned recently from our partner Flowtown that they have decided to change their API policy to no longer allow the social media discovery searches that some of our customers are using to power the “search social media” button in BatchBook. According to their blog post, starting January 1, 2011 this search will no longer be available to BatchBook customers who have set up an integration with Flowtown. This does not affect most BatchBook accounts, as we do have a lighter version of the search built in to every BatchBook account. This only affects those customers who had a separate Flowtown account and had set up their integration with BatchBook. We are working with other vendors to continue to increase and improve the social media integration in BatchBook

While we are sorry to see this change in policy from Flowtown, we do understand their need to adjust their API functionality to support their business efforts. This is a formative time in the world of integrated business development, and we appreciate Flowtown’s early and open discussions with us as they made these changes. We will continue to work with vendors such as Flowtown and other members of the Small Business Web to help establish best practices and standards for sharing information between social networks, online applications and mobile devices. Cloud customers can only win if we as an integrated business community work with each other and the social media networks to establish reliable procedures for data sharing.