It's great (the box I checked) -- but only if you do it consistently, so that people who read multiple sources can pick one to read, and tune out the others. e.g. if you post to DW, and cross-post to LJ, I want to read you on DW, and stop reading you on LJ -- but if you also sometimes post only to LJ, now I can't do that, or I'll miss some of your posts.
But if you do it consistently, it's great to have a way for you to publish what you want to publish, and let people pick how/where/etc they want to read it.
I was thinking in terms of writing software to handle cross-posting, so it would be automatic.
Based on a conversation elsewhere, I think cross-posting to similar services probably makes sense, but cross-posting different content doesn't.
E.g. cross posting between LJ & DW makes total sense since the services serve a similar niche. However cross-posting twitter/identi.ca messages to LJ is much more likely to annoy people as the purpose of the two types of sites are so different.
What I'm wondering now is, are services like Google+ & Facebook more like blog, more like twitter, or yet another class of entity?
I think it's somewhat wrong to think of these sites as having A Purpose TM; people use each of them for different purposes from each other. Twitter is maybe the most different, because of the 140-character limit, but there isn't any particular reason why I couldn't use any of those sites in the way that I currently use LJ.
The other thing that G+ and FB do, by virtue of being "real name" and photo centric, is make it easy to initiate contact with people. That was what FB was "for" for me, for a while -- I was finding people who I'd met, identifying them from their pictures; or people from high school, identifying them from their names.
(I'm in favor of G+ allowing pseudonyms, just noting that FB's "real name" policy did have this (unusual) effect.)
Maybe purpose isn't the right word. Each of the sites seem to have different cultures and conventions that build up as an interaction between the software and the users. The types of posts that people make to facebook seem different from the types posted to a blog, even though the UI for submitting a post isn't all that different.
Facebook evolved originally where the writer was writing to a small-ish circle of known people whereas a blog was intended to be publicly accessible, and as a result the writing styles differ.
I tend to view a post to any site whose hardware I don't control as a post to a public site, as there's really no reason to fully trust all of the system administrators at any site. (Heck I'm not sure if I fully trust a system that I control).
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But if you do it consistently, it's great to have a way for you to publish what you want to publish, and let people pick how/where/etc they want to read it.
Reply
Based on a conversation elsewhere, I think cross-posting to similar services probably makes sense, but cross-posting different content doesn't.
E.g. cross posting between LJ & DW makes total sense since the services serve a similar niche. However cross-posting twitter/identi.ca messages to LJ is much more likely to annoy people as the purpose of the two types of sites are so different.
What I'm wondering now is, are services like Google+ & Facebook more like blog, more like twitter, or yet another class of entity?
Reply
The other thing that G+ and FB do, by virtue of being "real name" and photo centric, is make it easy to initiate contact with people. That was what FB was "for" for me, for a while -- I was finding people who I'd met, identifying them from their pictures; or people from high school, identifying them from their names.
(I'm in favor of G+ allowing pseudonyms, just noting that FB's "real name" policy did have this (unusual) effect.)
Reply
Facebook evolved originally where the writer was writing to a small-ish circle of known people whereas a blog was intended to be publicly accessible, and as a result the writing styles differ.
I tend to view a post to any site whose hardware I don't control as a post to a public site, as there's really no reason to fully trust all of the system administrators at any site. (Heck I'm not sure if I fully trust a system that I control).
Reply
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