There are now so many microblogging platforms out there, and they're all so new none has quite achieved ubiquity yet. So teh kiddies at hellotxt have decided the right thing to do is to add anothr layer of aggregation on the interweb, this time to let you update all your microblog feeds from the one microblogger.
So gay! Why? Mostly bcoz they'll never keep up. New microblog apps appear quicker than anyone can blog about them, much less try them out.
But also because I'm starting to realise that all this blogging (and microblogging on top of that and microblog-aggregation on top of that) is taking the user in the wrong direction. Well, maybe not the generic user, but definitely me.
I'm being asked in the name of aggregation and convenience to step away from rich content and navigation and adopt command-line txt as my default mode of communication. I'm also being asked to divide and subdivide my total potential audience into smaller chunks based on how they want to receive me, with so much overlap between them it's usually possible to spam my true meatspace friends with my every thought.
This is what I get now.
I get to push my thoughts through an ever-narrowing set of command line options defined by the subset of content types that will pass all the way from microblog aggregator at the top down to flexible, rich media publishing platform at the bottom. If I got carried away with the aggregation model, the blog you're reading now could become merely an RSS feed of my Facebook News Feed of my Twitter tweets from my Hellotxt login.
That's just wrong. AFU. All my bases are belong to telco and jabber.org.
This is what I want.
Why do I want to flip the model?
For starters, I want to publish the richest possible content to the widest possible audience first. Blogger's my most flexible, creative publishing platform. OK, to bang out a post that includes much rich content I have to go to the immensely tedious trouble of logging in via a browser or blogging client, but I'm old enough to remember desktop publishing, and if you imagine that old standby of print publishing Quark Xpress to be like a four-hour full cavity search in a Kazakh checkpoint that's just run out of lube, then Blogger's browser interface seems like a standup quickie with a supermodel in comparison.
My Facebook and Myspace and Bebo and even Twitter presences are discoverable, but with nothing like the discoverability and search-crawler friendlyness of my long-established blog. Most of my blog readers have never read my stuff before. Sadly, most of them never come back, but that's an issue I could address if I wasn't so half-arsed.
My Blogger blog introduces me to more new people than anything else, and lets me publish just about anything. Slowly, tediously, but with more control over how and where it appears than just about anything.
Follow the arrows and you'll see my content gradually being stripped of its richness as it gets handed on to Facebook and my other social network platforms I have yet to abandon. At this stage it's still got the potential for images and video, but it gets separated into different modules and not all of it is shown to everyone I know on Facebook - some goes to one group but doesn't display for others.
Finally, at the Twitter level, I'd like just the txt pls, shrthnded enuf so it fits in 1 sms, but like right now, 2 the smllst grps of frnds i.e. 121.
In other words, I don't want my blog to become a vast bog roll of five years of my text haiku; I want my Twitter feed to be the best possible condensed goodness automagically gleaned from my Facebook page, which is automagically being updated from my Blogger blog.
Snap to it, frnds!
