With my recent twitter screen shots I am showing my snark for sure.
Yet, I am in no way advocating a rally for “let’s bail on twitter”. And to be honest, it really does not produce urine in my wheaties (as a variant of peeing in Cheerios for @fncil) when twitter goes down, out, or flying elephant. It serves as a wake uop call do to something productive 😉
So its been more as an experiment to see how the service works to try Ping.fm than some effort to be able to spread tweets everywhere.
Ping.fm was created for the sole purpose of making it as easy as possible to share your posts with the world. Now you don’t have to fumble around the web in order to post anymore, you can just post once, and be done with it.
The idea came about when making some posts to Twitter and Tumblr. The idea of posting the exact same information in two places seemed a bit tedious, so Ping.fm was born.
Once you have an account on ping.fm, you can configure it to accept your updates via the web, phone, IM (e.g. just like twitter) and it will send it to all the social networks you activate, so my messages sent via ping.fm can go to twitter, pownce, jaikui, facebook, linkedin, 14 in total.
So as an example, I used the web interface in ping.fm to compose my statuses… er.stati…. errr?
And this ended up in many places:
And as I also spray ping-ed around (pownce link), there is a WordPress plugin that will send a status of your blog posts out via ping,fm, essentially doing what TwitterTools does for just one little service. And there is also an iPhone/iPod Touch interface that allows access via these devices– see message sprayed from my iPod Touch (jaiku link).
Now I am not claiming, as my good colleague D’arcy semi-asserted, that this is a solution to twitters erratic state. I cannot even say I will use ping.fm on a regular basis- my primary network is twitter, yes, but at the same time, it is not realistic there will be One True Status Network to rule them all. In my little tests, ping.fm has set in place all of the input/outputs that i can use in twitter, and let me choose which services to send them. I think it is a worthy effort.
And now with a spike of interest bubbling about friendfeed; it may not even matter which service you use, if you toss it into the feed pool.
I like your description of it as “spray”. Since ping.fm or hellotxt (or even twhirl for Pownce and Jaiku) are all one direction only, they supplement rather than replace going to the web sites or client. To see responses to what you sent, you would still need to go to all of these sites.
When I started sending copies of my posts to Pownce and Jaiku from twhirl, I found duplicated content in Friendfeed. I ended up just pulling in content from Twitter.
I’m with ez on this. It’s ok to be able to post to multiple channels simultaneously, but I really need a way just as easy to bring the responses to ‘spraying’ back to me. Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce etc. are conversational tools to me, so I want to see the other half of the conversation too. That is why Jaiku is my main network, and I only use Twitter when at home behind my laptop screen. Jaiku lets me carry my conversations with me on my mobile.
A three letter response for how to get the spray back.
R
S
S
all the services have RSS feeds, where you can get your responses back. Or you suck as many as you want into friendfeed and use its RSS feed. Okay, its not instantaneous, but you wont miss anything sprayed at you.
Ahh, if you want them on your phone, that might be another story.
And for me, its not how I get the sprayback, but how I get the people i want/like/value in the sprayback.
Of course RSS can be used to collect any response, but that to me still breaks the conversational model as it is in a different interface/place/channel/app than where my original contributions are made. And indeed, mobile is a different beast entirely.
Breaking a conversational model is not the question here. Models were made to be broken. The question (imho) is how do we theorize a conversational model that does account for different interface/place/channel/app & whatever is next.
So, what is the problem with relying on your blog’s RSS to send out your feeds? i don’t understand why you need to spray the web with notices about your latest post… when anyone who wants to read it is already subscribed.
i like reading what you write. That’s why i subscribe to your RSS. But the beauty of RSS is i get to decide when i read it.
But then i don’t understand twitter.
Send me a tweet to say you’ve posted a blog?
.. but i’ve got your RSS feed already.
Just Don’t Get It.
“i think i’m dumb” Nirvana, ’93.
kind regards, michael
(“you” is meant to be generic above: please don’t take personally 🙂
@Catherine I should have said it breaks my conversational model, or in other words it currently makes it very hard for me to be aware or stay in the flow of conversations my ‘sprayed’ utterings kick loose. As to models, they’re not meant to be broken (that’s rules), but there to help me understand the world, but certainly need to be thrown away if we find a better model to understand this. Models are tools. So yes, new conversational models that take into account the wide spectrum of channels that conversation can take place in simultaneously would be very useful.
Michael- you are not dumb, especially if you reference Nirvana 😉 The things i post on twitter are much more, or shall i say, not equal to what i blog- hence the reason people even refer to it as “microbologging’.