Problem with Blogs and Micro-Blogs
A lot of my friends know that I have a lot of different instant messaging accounts like Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Skype, POPO, etc. I wish I could use Google Talk only but it’s not possible. Some of my friends prefer MSN. My job requires me to use AIM and POPO. Only Skype can make voice chat on my phone.
But the fact is, this never becomes a problem. I don’t have to open 10 different IM softwares every time I boot my computer or mobile phone. There are a lot of all-in-one IM softwares that I can choose, like pidgin, Nimbuzz and bitlbee. I can open only one software to sign up to most IM services and see most of my buddy list.
But for blogs and micro-blogs, things start to change.
Similar with the IM situation, my friends use all kinds of different blog and micro-blog services. To keep connect to them I have to follow their IM status message, their Twitter, their Facebook status message, their FriendFeed, their Plurk, their Google Reader shares and comments, their Google Wave, there LilyBBS blog, their Flickr, their Picasa Web Albums, their YouTube, their Vimeo, and their real blog. There are even more. I just don’t want to make the list too long.
It starts to be a big challenge to maintain all these services.
First, post. If I want to say anything to my friends I have to make sure I post my message to all the places that all my friends can see them from the service that they use. The “Have you really said that? I never see it on your LilyBBS blog.” “I posted it on my Plurk.” “Whaaaat? What is Plurk and what’s your Plurk account?” conversation happens too much for me.
This problem has been partially resolved by a service called Ping.fm. Ping.fm supports to post my messages to a lot of services at the same time. It supports most of the services my friends use. Not all the services, sadly, but still make things much better. Ping.fm also supports to post through variants of ways like Gtalk, SMS and email.
Second, read. My friends just post their messages to all kinds of different places and think I can read them all at the very first time, but it is just impossible to check all these places everyday. Every time I ask me if there is any service I forget to check for a long time, my answer is yes.
For blogs, there’s a solution. I just subscribe all the blogs into my Google Reader. Google Reader is a really great blog subscriber that does all the things I want perfectly. But I don’t want to subscribe micro-blogs because it’s not very convenient to read short numerous micro-blogs in Google Reader.
Then I found FriendFeed for micro-blogs. The first few times I use FriendFeed I thought it was a really good micro-blog subscriber but it turns out that it’s just another micro-blog and a good subscriber of all MY micro-blogs. There’s no reason I want to subscribe MY stuff.
Third, get the reply. People not only post stuff everywhere but also reply my messages everywhere. Some of the services provide email notifications of replies but for most of the services I have to check manually.
Forth, reply. I have to remember each service each of my friend checks often. A likes Facebook but never checks Twitter. B likes Twitter better and does not check Facebook often. I have to remember all these stuff to make sure I can reply on the right place.
Any suggestion is welcomed.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 10:17 pm and is filed under 疯疯癫癫. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
