Since the start of 2013 I’ve spoken about, well you could call it harping on, this year being the year of API chess and social media consolidation. And as is common with advertising platforms which Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin essentially are, it’s about channelling eyeballs to ads. That’s the end game, nothing else to see.

While social engagement and sharing is the cornerstone of most of the services all we’ve become in this is worker ants doing a lot of the heavy lifting to enable the advertisers figure out which ads to put in front of which eyeballs. Okay, with the volumes of data we’re talking about you still need the BigData marketing department to come along and Hadoop/MapReduce everything.

Let’s get one thing straight though, regardless of what founders may say about designing ecosystems and social networks.  Once an investor puts money in the emphasis is only to get money back and the easiest fallback where large numbers of eyeballs are concerned is to sell advertising and data.

Tweetdeck killed Facebook integration, it’s affected millions, and like I’ve said countless times it shouldn’t come as a big shock.  Twitter and Facebook are competitors, not social buddies. The relationship between these two companies, well, it’s complicated.

You are the product.

It’s not “social media”, it’s “worker ant media”. All your movements are worth something to them and while you keep moving for free they’ll keep making revenue. That’s what this is all about.