Agree with your PS. A factory is the way you hide your implementation classes (quoth c2: "It allows classes to defer object creation to a separate method") from callers who just use that API to obtain the specific flavour they're wanting with something like Bod::Social->new_for( 'Twitter' ) rather than explicitly hardcoding creating an instance of a specific subtype. End users just know they're getting something that isa Bod::Social and can expect it to provide that same interface specialized for their particular kind of thing. You also don't have to go change callers to have them instead instantiate Bod::Social::NewTwitter n months hence when you create a new subclass which is faster or handles some new wrinkle; change the factory and callers get the improved version without knowing they have to ask for it.

Prossibly not germane in this particular case but if all of the different "flavors" vary only in how to implement some common behavior you might could use Strategy to implement that instead of having full subclasses for each network/type (although you might still want to use a factory method for instantiating the different strategy implementations).

Or it could just be too early and ENOCAFFEINE and I'm rambling . . .