An argument for the opposite of Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed April 22, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , trackbackDon’t get me wrong, there is absolute value in knowing what my friends, colleagues, and people-I-pine-to-be-like are talking about. But not everyone who is in my circle uses an aggregator to follow me. I have friends who see my Twitter tweets. Some people see my updates on Facebook. I’d like to think people see my stuff on MySpace, but I doubt it (except maybe Lola and Cheyenne). I also have this blog, which is how my mother keeps up with me when I don’t call and return emails. Separately updating each social site, morphing the content to fit each format, is painful, tedious, and unlikely.
Inward-Out
Publishing my rich content and messages to all (or just some) of my social destinations in a single post is the opposite of the aggregators. They are Outward-In (not that there is anything wrong with that). MessageDance is Inward-Out.
The Middleware of the Internet
The key to this sexy processing comes from an unsexy tool — email. Email is still the killer-app. It is the most ubiquitous, under-utilized, and abused tool in everyone’s toolbox. When most people think of email, they think of spam. The beauty of using email in the context of MessageDance is that an email inbox is never the final destination of a message or content that has been shared. MessageDance uses the really good part of email which is its ability to transport data in the simplest of fashions. Along its journey, MessageDance transforms the format of the content for its final destination.
Portable and Powerful Email Address
Now there is great power in just an email address. You don’t need to start your sharing from an email client. Start in Facebook and send your extra-facebook messages, blog posts, tweets from the native Facebook messaging app. Stay on YouTube.com and share a video to Twitter by just using your MessageDance email handle. Hell, blog from Amazon.com if you must. Besides signing-up and adding a few settings, you never really need to use MessageDance.com or your email client — and still reap powerful Anywhere to Anywhere sharing.
Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail
Comments»
In advocating for “the opposite of Plaxo Pulse and Friendfeed,” which I will generalize to “the opposite of lifestream aggregation,” are you positioning MessageDance as an alternative model that competes with aggregation or a new mechanism that is complimentary to aggregators?
Highly complimentary. The Yin of your online Yin Yang. MessageDance offers the completion of the loop where the sharing of content {once} goes to all of the places you want it to go and lifestream apps can then report the places (and content) for your friends that use lifestreaming.
The unique power of MessageDance is in the portability of the email address you can use to share from the social network you start with. You don’t have to start with MessageDance.com to do this sharing. Start from Facebook, Digg, YouTube and share using “you”@messagedance.com and have it go anywhere you want.
This would cause a LOT of duplication. Not a good way to solve this problem. Each island should be posted to separately and aggregated together. Answers from the aggregator can then be pushed back out to the associated social network, er, island. Bad idea, though.
Thanks Robert for taking a look. There is no duplication for those that don’t use (and never will use) an aggregator. That’s the point. Single publish that goes to disparate endpoints (and audience).
geoffwolfe: I believe a lot of us WILL use aggregators. That’s why this kind of thing will be seen as a bad thing. Particularly early adopters are going to hate this.
Gotta have the last word on my blog ;) Duplication is a problem independent of MessageDance. Filtering is the key for aggregators to be useful.