I think many content creators have an uneasy alliance with Twitter. They might like the ability to share thoughts with a wider audience, but dislike having their content and thoughts housed in a proprietary silo. One developer recognized this, and created a service called micro.blog after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
The best summary of micro.blog was contained in a blog post on the site:
Instead of yet another social network, Micro.blog is designed to work with the open web. It’s built on RSS and independent microblogs. It’s about pulling together short posts and making them more useful and easier to interact with. It prioritizes both a safe community of microblogs as well as the freedom to post to your own site.
The service’s About page also explains the concept further:
Instead of trying to be a full social network, Micro.blog is a thin layer that glues the open web together, making it more useful. Micro.blog adds discovery and conversations on top of previously unconnected blog posts.
With micro.blog, you can publish to your own domain name (or publish through micro.blog) and control your own content. Even if you publish to your own domain name, you can always see your posts in a familiar timeline interface at micro.blog or its apps, along with with centralized replies and favorites. In a way, your posts live at two places at once.
You may have already noticed a couple of shorter posts here at 40Tech over the past 24 hours. Those are posts that I initiated through the micro.blog app. Given my time constraints over the last few months, I can see myself posting in this format a bit more frequently. 1 I also realize this could be something I try for a while, but don’t stick with for the long haul. We’ll see. For now, my posts will crosspost to my Twitter account as well.
If you want to give micro.blog a try, you can register. The basic service is free if you don’t need hosting (it may work with some free hosting services, like Tumblr). Micro.blog also offers a $5/month plan if you want them to host your microblog. If you host your own site, you can pay $2 per month for cross posting to Twitter and Facebook.
You can see my microblogging posts here at 40Tech, or at micro.blog/40tech.
Yes, I recognize the irony of describing a microblogging service with a long blog post.↩
