Micro-blogging needs syndication

Phil posted today “Is twitter a serious business tool or just a complete waste of time?”. I dropped him a comment but in writing it, I came to a realisation that I felt deserved it's own post here.

twitter is the most successful micro-blogging platform in town but it still only serves a niche community of hip, internet things who love whatever is new. Pownce and Jaiku are the closest competition but the problem is critical mass, if I'm using twitter do I want to use pownce to interact with friends you follow there and jaiku for another set? No.

Very few people actually read this blog ( steady, there's more to this sentence ;) ) from the website, most read through an RSS/ATOM reader of some kind. They aggregate the feeds from a number of different sources into one easily consumable window on the blogging world. This is why blogging has become so damn successful, because it gives the reader control of how they consume.

In the micro-blogging world I need to visit multiple websites or download lots of clients to keep up to date with each network, which just isn't practical.

If all networks were to introduce a standard syndication methodology, something more suited to live messaging and the Internet like XMPP then clients could take feeds from all the sites that I like to track in one easily consumed form.

If I particularly liked Pownce's file sharing then I could use that through it's desktop client but it wouldn't preclude me from keeping up to date with all my other networks in an easily digestible form. Further if I liked the russian roulette that is twitter's up-time I could stick with that as my micro-blogging platform.

The problem is all these services want to attract audiences and keep them so they can advertise to them or whatever the business model based on subscriber numbers is, so they think they need a closed shop. However, if they don't grow the micro-blogging market, they won't grow themselves. Good ol' Catch-22.

So I ask you, micro-blogging platforms of the world unite, enable syndication and make micro-blogging as relevant and useful as blogging. Then you can concentrate on providing the best platform for your niche. For if you do there might just be a significant market to aim at.

Loving Windows Live Writer

Like Microsoft have created some blogging software, that's like free and like works with everything that's not Microsoft and is like really useful and like really works and like doesn't pollute your markup with loads of MS specific guff.

Who'd of thought?

I really recommend you check it out: Windows Live Writer

Searching for my twitter identity

Ewan of SMS Text News came to see us at Esendex yesterday. One of the subjects we chewed on, over Coke and tomato juice (boy it was a wild afternoon ;-)) was twitter.

I've followed twitter for a while and been intrigued, if not wowed, by the service it provides. "What are you doing?" is a question potentially of interest to a some people I know but in the most part, they're probably not interested in everything.

I decided to try and start using it last week and was soon tweeting about a trip to Legoland with the family, the triathlon I competed in, an 'interesting' thought on mobile I'd had. I've setup twitterfeed so whenever I post a blog entry that appears as well. I dropped the widget on my blog and sat back, proud that I was embracing the latest in social networking, communication, thingies. But then I looked again and realised it was just noise.

It was a stream of consciousness with no theme and questionable relevance to it's audience.

People I know in the industry and with whom I discuss trends, happenings, etc are likely to be interested in my thoughts on my trip to Global Messaging 2008 as I am with their's. If we're to shape an industry this kind of collective knowledge sharing is fantastic. Unfortunately most of those guys don't care about me building part of record breaking Lego tower. In fact, having that on my stream is a positive hinderance when we're all following multiple people and trying to discern what everyone's doing relative to the mobile industry.

Likewise my mates with whom I cycle and race with will want to know of my racing exploits. My Mum want's to know about Legoland and her grandchildren. That is assuming that these groups actually use twitter, given most of them aren't geeks that is unlikely, but that should probably be the subject of another post.

So it comes down to a question of identity. What should my twitter persona be? Do I need multiple twitter personas? What if I want to overlap those personas?

The ideal scenario for me would be to be able to categorise my tweets, set up sub-micro feeds. Your own categories could be presented as a optional set of check boxes on the update page. The main feed would still work, but these categories would be presented as sub feeds.

   http://twitter.com/adambird
   http://twitter.com/adambird/mobile
   http://twitter.com/adambird/family
   http://twitter.com/adambird/tri
   ..etc
  

SMS input could still be preserved by twitter providing multiple text in numbers that can be mapped to your mobile number and category. Meaning, multiple people could use the same numbers with different categories. They'd only need as many numbers as the maximum number of sub-feeds people would need/be allowed. I can't imagine it costing them any more money.

However, for me this would only solve part of the problem. A big question is. "Is the world tweeting about something of relevance to me?". It's all very well if the people you follow know about something but the world is a big place. The new iPhone goes on sale and they're all broken, my customers are complaining about my services, a band I desperately want to see have just released tickets for some surprise gigs, there's an impromptu demonstration about human rights abuses happening NOW. All of things would really require a common syntax, semantic tagging, to be accurate. Something I'm chewing on and will post on later.

So, for the moment http://twitter.com/adambird is going to become an extension of this blog, alongside BlogIt and the good old fashioned web browser. Another means of registering and diseminating my thoughts and views on Esendex and the industry as a whole. Let me know.

Is mobile blogging the answer to blog torpor?

As regular readers will know, I had a bit of a blogging hiatus through December. Truth is I just got out of the habit. I got busy and my blog was the balancing item.

I suspect that this is the case for the vast majority of blogs out there. We start with good intentions but soon the next interesting thing comes along and today's brilliant, can't live without, new toy becomes yesterday's forgotten plaything.

Services like Twitter are designed to disseminate transitory information. I have signed up for an account but I really can't imagine anyone would find my random thoughts of interest, and anyway I can't really be bothered. The good thing about Twitter is if I say something that I subsequently wish I hadn't it doesn't hang around. It's forgotten in the sea of titbits about everyone's lives.

Blogs however are a different story. With their archives and syndication, once you've hit publish, that's it. This certainly makes me consider everything I'm posting and perhaps that's constraining the content and timeliness.

One of the problems with timeliness is access to a computer to make posting possible. By the time you get home, there are umpteen other things to catch up on before writing up the blog post you thought about while on the train, in the car, out at lunch.

In the past I've used my BlackBerry for mobile blogging, sending an email to this blog for editing later. When I remember to do it, it works pretty well, though I end up having to reformat and strip off the rather long (thanks to legislation) company email signature. We've recently launched BlogIt here at Esendex so people without email devices can do the same using just SMS.

While these services help to enable the physical act of blogging as and when the mood strikes I also think they require a bit of an attitude shift. I have to remember that every blog post doesn't have to be a long considered essay, it's perfectly legitimate to post something up as when the feeling takes me.

I probably should be championing mobile blogging via SMS as the answer with us running the BlogIt service, but in reality I'll use a mix of both. It'll depend on the situation at the time, what device I have with me, how long the post is, and whether I want to give it a bit of thought before posting.

The key point is that mobile blogging, be it by SMS or mobile email, gives me that choice. For something to become a habit, it needs to be easily assimilated into your everyday life. I spend a lot of time emailing and texting while on the move so now I can blog just as easily.

Expect to hear more from me.