A bit of context:: This is, sort of, a postscript to How I Currently Use Social Media. I was jotting some of this down to send via a test message to the friend mentioned below… and realized it would make a good short blog post. So here were are.
My friend Brad East just started trying out micro.blog (which readers here may recall I spent some time using over the years). On reading his approach — which is, necessarily, somewhat different from mine given our very different goals for microblogging: as one would expect given our very different fields and approaches — I had this thought:
One bonus item on his reasons to like micro.blog (and things like it) is that people can just subscribe via feed. Google Reader’s demise pushed a lot of people off using RSS/Atom/etc., but it still works as well as it ever did, and you can still subscribe to most any site in the world — including Brad’s microblog — for free. On Mac or iOS, you can use NetNewsWire. I am sure there are similar options on Windows and Android. And Brad’s micro blog posts — or anyone else’s on well-designed platforms which support it — can just be short notes you read alongside the long essays that pop up from time to time from some other author publishes.
That is: microblogs are currently associated with “social media”. But they are not intrinsically social, and there are good ways to use microblogs, and blogs in general that are not social at all. That is, simply, good: at least as an option to have on the table.