Crushpath: How social web standard design patterns help us ship faster

Monica Wilkinson 
Director of Platform at Crushpath
http://crushpath.me/Monica

Crushpath is a startup focused on providing SMBs with a simple and affordable promotion platform. 

Marketing and promotion have evolved tremendously in the last years with the rise of social networks and social media. Effective promotion means leveraging all these channels to create and nurture business relationships and opportunities.
Most business owners that we help with Crushpath are new to the world of Marketing and Social Media and need help knowing how to get started and get the most out of their time and money.
Crushpath eases their pain by providing them a unified platform to quickly create their pitch, promote it to these channels and then manage the responses in real time.

What this means for the Platform Engineering team at Crushpath is that we need to integrate with a plethora of social networks and services using their APIs and do so very effectively to satisfy the needs of our customers.

Our plan is to share with the workshop the use cases, struggles and successes building a startup that relies so heavily on social web and external businesses on the web. We will cover briefly our use of OAuth, REST, PubSubHubbub and more in depth with Activity Streams as well as integrations with Twilio, Evernote, Box, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Google+. We will include in the discussion how Activity Streams has helped our internal needs of providing a distributed platform.