Matthew Lang

Major gains.

This week I finally got my invite to Micro.blog.

A few months ago Manton Reece wrote about a project he was working on to bring together micro-blogging using the format of RSS. He started a Kickstarter around it which went successfully. This week, I'm finally getting round to getting my account set up and following a few people.

The idea is simple. You can host your own micro-blog on Micro.blog or you can import an RSS feed from somewhere else so that it becomes your timeline. Rather than fencing people into the product, you can bring your own RSS feed and use that for your timeline. Neat idea.

First Impressions

At first the service looks pretty basic. Your own timeline is a simple list of recent posts from the people you are following. There's options to reply, delete and favourite to posts on your timeline. So far so good.

While your timeline is a minimal affair in the styling department, your own feed can be tarted up with one of six designs that can pick from in your account preferences. There's also the option to add some CSS styling of your own.

There's also an app for the iPhone as well as the ability to post to it from the MarsEdit text editor should that be your preference.

Let's not forget this is a bootstrapped product that began life on Kickstarter. I'm certainly not going to compare it in anyway to Twitter or Facebook, but compared the to launch of App.net it feels slower. It's early days though and it's live which more than can be said of what others have promised when it comes to challenging the establishment.

Using Micro.blog

I considered streaming a tagged feed from this blog as my main feed for Micro.blog but there were was one problem with this. The Ghost theme's feed isn't customisable, so there's no way for me to omit these posts from my main feed. The reason I wanted to omit them is that I might be posting three or more times a day and I didn't want to change the frequency of my blog's posting for this.

So instead I think I might just post from the Micro.blog site and then map my timeline to a sub-domain of this site.

So where does that leave other social media outlets that I am a part of?

Well from here on in I'll be largely using IFTTT to posting to Twitter. It will largely be an automated feed from my blog, my Micro.blog posts, Instagram and any other platforms that I use. Twitter has it's uses and I'm not ready to bow out from it yet, but the for the foreseeable future it will be a "write only" environment for me.

After being burned by App.net, I'm aware that Micro.blog is still in the early days of its service life so I'm not going to invest too much time on it. A couple of posts a day should be sufficient.

I'm keen to see how this service grows over the next few months. I'm not expecting drastic changes overnight, but a gradual roll out of new features between now and the end of the year shouldn't be out of the question.

You can find me on Micro.blog here.