This week Zadi talked about a few of the personal aggregators out there that let you pull your feeds from services like Twitter and Pownce so all your updates show up in one centralized location. If you use an aggregator like FriendFeed, Socialthing, or iminta it doesn't matter which networks you use and which ones I use -- we can keep up with each other on the same website.
An alternative approach sort of accomplishes the same thing by doing the exact opposite -- instead of pulling from multiple places, it lets you send to multiple places, and it's causing a bit of controversy in the social space. I'm talking about "status blasting" services like HelloTxt, which let you to ping multiple services with the same message simultaneously.
The idea behind "blasters" is that your friends will see your updates on whichever network they check most regularly. No need to introduce a new service in the already crowded space. Makes sense, right? Here's the problem. What if you check multiple networks regularly? And let's be honest, most of us do already. You're going to see the same person's updates over and over again.
So in the end you might have to choose one method over the other. They are fundamentally different approaches to the same problem. Is it spamming when you blast several networks at once, or is it acceptable because your friends have chosen to follow your updates (and can just as easily unfollow you)?
And by choosing blasters are we essentially pigeonholing ourselves to 1 or 2 networks save from being inundated with copies of the same message across the social web?
Should the community make a collective decision about which platform to support? I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this one.
Alex said:
As of now I'd be anti-blasting. Web 2.0 and all of its wonderful social networking/bookmarking/etc services really brought the human back to the Internet. Blasting takes a big step back. I'd say choose the sites you really want to be a part of. I'm not active in Pownce right now, so why should I just throw up the same status message as everywhere else just to have content more places?
Junsu Park said:
Hmmm.... I really don't know. It might be good for people who are trying to get people who don't use Friendfeed or iminta. In truth, the people I know that have multiple accounts are the true geeks, not normal regular people.
So, I think Hellotxt is just trying to help them.
Now, recieving the same updates over and over, it can be a hassle. I just hope that Friendfeed or whichever aggregator makes their own blaster that makes sure our friends don't get same "I'm at the mall" update over and over.
Wait, doesn't that sounds like a new Web 2.0 app?! Quick, Google, make a new app!
