Being the inquisitive sort of chap that I am, I often find myself trying out new things on the internet, and wondering how I might make use of them. While this blog, the “Enormous Waste of Webspace” might be termed my “blog”, I have recently been toying with both Tumblr and Posterous.
You may recall that I looked at Tumblr once before - and ended up not doing anything with it.
I think I have a use for it now though - you might call it “anything except Twitter”.
Twitter is very public. It’s kind of like text messaging the world. I wanted some kind of record of “what I’ve been up to” so I can look back and recall what I was working on each day. At timesheet time, I’ve discovered this method of working is invaluable. Twitter is an obvious candidate for this task, but I’m sure those who follow my twitter posts (over 200 of you!) have absolutely no interest in my various battles with C#, SQL, PHP, SharePoint, Javascript, and so on.
A little lightbulb appeared above my head and switched on. Tumblr. Perfect. It lets me post text, photos, quotes and anything else I deem “remember-worthy” into a record that I can look back on. It’s public, but I have no problem with that - I have nothing to hide.
At the same time I was playing with Tumblr, a new web startup appeared - Posterous. Similar in many respects to Tumblr, but it’s visitor interface is fixed (you can monkey with Tumblr). It’s primarily designed to be posted to via email, and it displays media files wonderfully. If you were looking for a no-nonsese photo, video or sound blog, Posterous hits all the nails on the head.
I seem to have quite accidentally found myself using WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous and Twitter.
WordPress (in the guise of this blog) is great for long think pieces - like this one.
Tumblr is great for posts no longer than a short paragraph - mainly to myself as reminders - although others may indeed find them entertaining.
Posterous is great to post photos for sharing with the world and it’s dog. Random snaps you otherwise would not have deemed interesting enough for Flickr, or a blog post.
Twitter is great to elicit responses from your peers. A single sentence cast out to the interwebs and whoever may be watching.
One of the “issues” with dumping information in so many places is how you might follow somebody that does so. Easy - FriendFeed.
Friendfeed provides an aggregated feed of everything I write, say and post across all services I have chosen to include. It also lets me follow the firehose of information coming from all of my friends. Even if people are not members, I can add “imaginary” versions of themselves and attach their known feeds. It’s very clever, and has supplanted Google Reader as my main means of keeping up with the world.