Category Archives: micro-blogging

[UPDATE: solution] Struggling to re-route my microblog posts and shared reading

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[UPDATE, January 30, 2010: I think I found a solution. I created an additional notify.me account, so now I can handle two different flows.

(1) Shared reading:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipe -> notify.me (1st account) -> Ping.fm -> Twitter, Hi5, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Identi.ca, Plurk

(2) (Other) status updates / microblog posts:

Twitter -> Yahoo! Pipe -> notify.me (2nd account) -> Ping.fm -> LinkedIn, Typepad, Hi5, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Facebook, Identi.ca, Plurk, Tumblr

(3) Posting from any other place (e.g. Skype) to Ping.fm, or from the Ping.fm web UI:

-> Ping.fm -> @tt in post -> Twitter -> (see 2 above)

I'm testing now. Hope it will work this way.

Tweet: http://ping.fm/txw1h [UPDATE: solution] Struggling to re-route my microblog posts and shared reading

Okay, method number (3), with the @tt prefix, seems to work. At least it seems to post to Twitter only…]

Twitter's implementation of "reply" and "retweet" functionality inside its web UI is compelling me to set it apart from other social networks that support status updates and microblog posts.

Where I used to input my microblog posts in Ping.fm in order to distribute them to virtually all my accounts on social web services (including Twitter), I now find it a better idea to input on Twitter first, and then have my tweets automatically route to the other services.

Why? Because I want to use Twitter's "reply" and "retweet" buttons whenever an interesting conversation unfolds on Twitter.

Until now, I would type in the @ or RE or RT syntax manually. This involved the same effort whether on the Twitter web UI or on the Ping.fm web UI. So I would usually go to Ping.fm in order to spread my tweet across services.

Twitter now adds useful metadata when e.g. replying to a tweet. Due to that metadata, you can actually see on Twitter to which tweet I was replying. This is very useful. Since that metadata does not travel with my message when I write it on Ping.fm, I am compelled to write every reply on Twitter itself.

One such compelling reason is enough for me to switch from Ping.fm to Twitter.

Current flow:

Ping.fm -> all my accounts on social web services

AND:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> notify.me -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts

Desired flow:

Twitter -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (except Twitter)

AND:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> (notify.me?) -> Twitter -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (except Twitter)

OR:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (including Twitter)

The challenge that I've run into is to do with notify.me. As far as I can tell, I can setup notify.me to post to Ping.fm in one way only: either for Ping.fm to post to Twitter only, or for Ping.fm to post to all my social web accounts (including or excluding Twitter).

I'm wondering if there's a hack, or whether I will need to find another service, similar to notify.me, in order to create a different route.

I've been trying some syntax suggested by Ping.fm in order to specify to which services it should post – by including that syntax into the Yahoo! Pipes feed.

In particular, I've tried to include #T in the Yahoo! Pipe after I had created a posting group "#T" on Ping.fm which included only Twitter. To no effect.

I then tried to include @tt in the Yahoo! Pipe hoping that Ping.fm would post only to Twitter, but none of those posts seem to go through at all. Three of them were picked up by notify.me, but none appeared on my "recent posts" on Ping.fm.

(I do apologize for my messy language here. It's late and I should really be sleeping. But this is bugging me.)

LATER: Right, after I removed "@tt" from the Yahoo! Pipe, my Google Reader shared reading items do seem to go through again.

EVEN LATER: Well, maybe not. But I need to get some sleep now. Let's see how much has gone through by sunrise. In any case, seems like I need to find an additional grab-and-post service like notify.me in order to enable two out of three routes from the desired flow described above.

Forcing yourself to become part of the conversation

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(From Seth's Blog: 'Four videos about noise, social and decency')

Best quote from Seth Godin in this short video on (micro?)blogging, starting at 00:44:


"(…) basically you are doing it for yourself to force yourself to become part of the conversation even if it's just that big (i.e. small – JS). (…)"

http://www.youtube.com/v/livzJTIWlmY&hl=en&fs=1&

Diverse content calls for diversified routing

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(First time using the 'All New Typepad' user interface, BTW. So far so nice… Stowe Boyd was struggling with Tumblr and Typepad recently, but he now seems to be giving Typepad the benefit of the doubt. Hence, my expectations are high :-)   Would be worth a separate blog post when I've used it for a while.)

Okay, more about figuring out the workflow.

There are different kinds of content which I'd like to route in different ways.

Blog posts. (They are too modest to be called "essays", but the general idea is that they are self-contained articles, fairly "round" ideas, thoughts or stories – versus the 140-chars contributions to the conversations of the Live Web). Requirements:

  1. I should be able to post them from the web as well as by email. (Options: Typepad interface, from Posterous, via email to Typepad, via email to Posterous)
  2. They should go onto my main blog at www.josschuurmans.com.
  3. Then they should be reposted on my other blogs on WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Posterous, linking back to www.josschuurmans.com. (This I may have to re-consider. One main blog may be enough. I don't necessarily want to maintain various unfederated comment threads across different blog tools.)
  4. Then they should be reposted as micro-blog posts and status updates on various other social media and social networks, linking back to www.josschuurmans.com. (I can do this either manually through Ping.fm, or I can set up a feed from www.josschuurmans.com (possibly via Yahoo! Pipes) to notify.me and Ping.fm – or possiblly using Tumblr or Posterous somewhere in the middle)
  5. They should also be aggregated on my life stream, which I haven't set up yet.

Micro-blog posts and status updates. (140-chars Live Web contributions). Requirements:

  1. I should be able to post them from the web as well as by email, and possibly by SMS. (Options: Ping.fm, Posterous.)
  2. They should at least go onto my life stream, which I haven't set up yet.
  3. Some (most?) of them might also go onto my blog(s), in particular www.josschuurmans.com. I could set up two different processes, one for posting micro-blog post to all networks including my blog, and one to all networks excluding my blog. (E.g. use Ping.fm to post to all except my blog, and use e.g. FriendFeed to post to Ping.fm plus my blog – or set up different preferences in notify.me)

Shared Reading. (Whatever I read and find worth sharing and conversing about). Requirements:

  1. I will tag what I read online, on Google Reader or otherwise, and which I find worth sharing publicly.
  2. That tagged content will produce an XML feed (from Google Reader), and it currently gets posted via Yahoo! Pipes, notify.me and Ping.fm as micro-blog posts and status updates.
  3. It doesn't get posted on www.josschuurmans.com.
  4. It should get posted onto my life stream, which I haven't set up yet. FriendFeed is a probably candidate.
  5. (I've explained the shared reading flow here and more recently here).

Other (life stream?) content.

  1. Actually, I wonder what kind of content that could be. There's probably stuff I'd like to capture or bookmark without publishing it onto my blog or conversing about it on the Live Web. I might live on various services for managing e.g. email, notes or multimedia content, with restricted access. (Gmail, Google Apps, Ovi, Evernote…)
  2. If it's public information but not something I'd broadcast, it could perhaps be fed into my life stream, e.g. on FriendFeed. For example, results of vanity searches :-)
  3. In other words, I'm not yet quite clear what this category will include.

(BTW, one downside of using Google Mail (IMAP) from the email client on my Nokia N97 is that the device doesn't remember email contacts the way Google Mail (or Gmail) does. I am considering to use Google Mail throught the browser on the N97 instead. Will have to test the difference. And I hope to post something separately about my experience with the new machine after a while.)

Ping.fm to your Typepad blog via del.icio.us

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Even though Ping.fm doesn’t post your micro-blog entries / status updates directly onto Typepad blogs, there is a nice workaround: set up daily links posts to your Typepad blog from your del.ico.us account, then set up Ping.fm to post to del.ico.us.

At least if your Ping.fm post include a web link, del.icio.us will save it as a bookmark and then include it in the daily links post to your blog.

I like the Ping.fm integration with Blogger and WordPress better, but I do find this acceptable for now.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

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The Live Web Will Be Federated

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Reply

Under the headline 'Blogging 2.0: Moving Toward Conversational "Flows"', Bill French wrote a piece on MyST Blogsite, in which he observes that conversations on the Internet are increasingly moving away from being contained within blogs, towards being distributed among lifestreaming or micro-blogging services (Bill calls them "flow applications") such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.

He quotes me by saying:

"(…) Ironically, in this comment, Jos Schuurmans equate sthe emergence of social networks with the end of “channels”. (…)"

I subscribe to the view that online conversations will be less and less contained within channels, while more and more federated among and across different platforms and services. To the extent that channels can be seen as walled gardens, the emergence of the blogosphere itself was the disruption that started taking down those walls.

The point I was trying to make earlier, under 'The End of Channels?' and ''Channels' does not sufficiently describe the dynamics of distributed online conversations', is that conversations take place across and between channels, not just within, and that it is therefore less useful to think of the Web in terms of channels. As David Weinberger and Doc Searls have pointed out: the Internet is a place, not a medium.

Indeed, enablers like Jaiku, Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Ping.fm, and Facebook are speeding up the trend of conversations being more distributed. But what these services represent most of all is the shift from a more static Web to the "live Web".

Another application worth mentioning in this context is Disqus, an enabler of blog comments federation. If Dave Winer will have his way, something similar is going to happen to micro-blogging as well… And why wouldn't he?

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