Apr 17, 2008
BlogIT and MessageDance’s anywhere-to-anywhere publishing model
I am going out on a limb here. I will try to deal this in a blogger-to-blogger tone. As a co-founder of bootstrapped startup I realize how hard it is to get lead blogger’s attention. It’s equally hard to execute on Howard Aiken’s famous quote - “if your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”.
Last week we rolled out something which we believe is the direction industry will eventually move towards. Idea of allowing content publishing from any website to any website. We proved this by demonstrating how this can be done using Amazon, Facebook, leading email services and RSS reader such as Google Reader. There are many more we are working on but that’s not the point here.
Yesterday Six Apart announced BlogIT, which seems to be a step in the right direction. Leading vendors see the user motivation here and clearly see that there is no point guessing which way user will go next. Simple answer is anywhere. Facebook, Twitter or your favorite life-streaming startup (enough on that one). Soon we will see Typepad posting from Wordpress.com. Users want it and vendors will have to support competing services. This is the new competitive landscape in digital media space.
Marshall thinks this is the beginning of next big thing.
The service could be more fully developed but it’s certainly in the lead compared to other services aiming to do the same thing. A close look at the details leads us to believe that this could be a much bigger move than it might seem to be. Here’s a few reasons why we believe it’s so interesting
He believes this example throws interesting twist to the growing identity problem. He is probably right. What he is not talking about is user motivation. Users want freedom. As in having easy bookmark capability, as in having easy sharing options below all blog posts, as in many one-click one-time operations. Plain old productivity motivation trumps identity pain. At least in the short run.
John thinks this move by Six Apart adds to the overall open social promise:
BlogIt is a very cool tool that embraces one of the foundational notions of the open Social Web: that once someone gets into using one social application, they will quite naturally begin to use multiple social applications, whether that’s social networks, blogs, microblogs, content aggregators, or whatever. The natural consequence of that is fragmentation, which, in the current “walled garden” phase of the Web, creates all sorts of hassles, inconvenience, and missed opportunity for richer interaction.
Surprisingly, he did not mention MessageDance. We also demonstrated this by releasing working examples.
Relentless innovation is the only way out to consistently rise above competing solutions. I wish industry thought leaders compare vendors on their merit and not on their pedigree.
Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail
Hmmmm. Taking the liberty of publicly-posting something about our private conversation may not prove in the long-run to be the best way to win me over, but in the short-term, I see you’ve managed to get your post up on to Techmeme. So, props for that!
No offense, but I still don’t get MessageDance or the problem you’re solving. That doesn’t mean you’re not on to something, and I certainly wish you the best of luck with it!
John - aren’t we all doing conversations and debating different ways to solve content sharing problem. My comment was in that context. Nothing more.
Apology if I offended you.
Though I didn’t get your point about Techmeme?
I could not resist dropping few lines here after reading your post. I’m specifically talking about John McCrea’s para that you described.
My first reaction to that block of text after reading “Does John McCrea guy knows what he is talking about?, Is he talking Shakespeare for web 2.0? or just bunch of nice words, if you put them together in a sentence sounds like a noise” , I would have dropped this comment on his blog also but he would have removed it, so it is pointless there.
Going back to MessageDance’s blog publishing feature, I must say I like it even though I have not used it heavily but it damn simple and convenient to use from YouTube, Amazon, Popular web mail’s and Facebook. I specially like the how you can attach images and map them in the email body, and tagging/category feature. I do not see that in BlogIT. Well anyways MessageDance folks all the best to you guys, It is a fact that it is hard to get attention of these big folks, as you are small (no matter how good you are).
No worries, not offended. I am eager to come to understand your unique value prop (so I can help share the word)!
Brij, I’m guessing that you and I share a similar vision for where the web is going and how it is evolving. I’ll also stick up for John McCrea as while he may be a “marketing guy” he definitely gets it.
As you said, I think both MessageDance and Blog It (and I’m sure other applications too) show this evolution of services working with each other via APIs to exchange and allow the creation of content. I’d love to write an “evolution of the mashup” post, but right now the closest I have is some of my thoughts on App Engine from last week. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/04/app-engine-facebook-platform-o.html
@John thanks. Will definitely follow up on that.
@David. Thanks for sharing link. App Engine is a huge new wrinkle I agree. It would be interesting to see how Google ties-in AppEngine with existing Google Apps.
Going beyond platform and standards fight, user behavior shift is hard to anticipate. Twitter came out of nowhere as a cultural shift and now claiming its rightful position as a viable platform.
Platform/standards play before user behavior shift is primarily a market force question - to be judged on economics and vendor commitment.