Fixed an issue this morning that should make a dramatic improvement to how fast a post shows up in the timeline from a Micro.blog-hosted blog.
As I was writing some documentation this week, I kept thinking about what makes great marketing copy. 37signals used to say that copywriting is a form of user interface design. That’s true but I think there’s more to it.
The best products don’t just have marketing copy; they have a mission statement. They don’t just sell a tool; they sell a movement.
When I stare at my product wondering if it’s too confusing — if it’s too different, and tries to do too many things, to be immediately understood by new users — I try to remind myself that it’s an opportunity. Instead of simply explaining what I’m doing, how can I pitch it in a way that strengthens a community around the idea. Because dozens of bloggers can spread the idea more quickly and in a more meaningful way than I can by myself.
And unlike a one-way press release, a community is inherently two-way. Every mention of the idea is both marketing and feedback. Someone blogs about how they’re excited for the product, but also how they wish it had a certain missing feature. Someone in the press writes a review, but also with a pros and cons list.
This cycle means the product gets better. And if we’re thoughtful in that first approach to marketing copy, then every blog post, review, and tweet that follows is laced with a little part of our mission statement.
Mirrored from the original post on manton.org.
It’s a common theme for Dave Winer to write about preserving our writing on the web. Today he outlines some criteria for judging whether a web host will last:
“The concern is that the record we’re creating is fragile and ephemeral, so that to historians of the future, the period of innovation where we moved our intellectual presence from physical to electronic media will be a blank spot, with almost none of it persisting.”
I think about this in 2 parts. The first is publishing your weblog to your own domain name. This ensures that your writing doesn’t go away and links don’t break when your web host goes out of business, because you can copy your content somewhere else and map your domain to that new location.
The second is some kind of host that will last forever. This is an unsolved problem. Hosting fees need to be paid, domain name registrations need to be renewed. It may be too big a leap to ever get there, but we could settle instead for better mirroring of content. I’d like to have my content mirrored automatically to GitHub Pages, for example, and maybe even Medium.
Imagine the life of a printed book from the early 20th century that has now survived generations. How was this possible? Many copies must have been printed, because some will inevitably be lost or destroyed. And when a library or bookstore is closed, copies of the book must be transferred to a new location.
This all follows naturally with a printed book, but to adopt the same pattern for digital works, we must go out of our way to create a system of mirroring and long-term storage that tries to match what happens in the real world automatically. It’s a great challenge.
Unfortunately very little has changed on this topic since I wrote about permanence 3 years ago. But we can change that. Open formats and auto-mirroring will be a key part of my new microblogging platform.
Mirrored from the original post on manton.org.
Medium is really interesting, and beautifully designed, but it’s not progress over Twitter unless you’re annoyed about the 140 character limit. It’s still totally centralized, has no API, and works against wanting to host and control our own content. Basically a step back for the open web. (Although I think there’s real value in mirroring content here.)
The Atlantic has an interesting essay on whether Twitter is on a slow decline, less useful and meaningful than it once was:
“Twitter is the platform that led us into the mobile Internet age. It broke our habit of visiting individual news homepages first thing in the morning, and established behaviors built around real-time news consumption and production. It normalized mobile publishing power. It changed our expectations about how we congregate around shared events. Twitter has done for social publishing what AOL did for email. But nobody has AOL accounts anymore.”
It reminds me of something I brought up on Core Intuition a few months back, wondering if Twitter is a core part of the web, something that would be with us forever, or if it is “just another web site”. When we get into the groove of using a new service for a few years, it’s easy to forget that web sites don’t have a very good track record. Giant sites like Facebook and Tumblr seem to have been with us forever, but my personal blog is older than both.
Think about this: if it’s even possible for Twitter to fail — not likely, just possible — then why are we putting so much of our content there first, where there are rules for how tweet text can be used? Storage for all tweets is so massive that there’s no guarantee that other companies will be able to take over the archive if the service has to fold. It’s why I built Tweet Library and Watermark to archive and publish tweets.
Decentralization is the internet’s greatest strength and weakness. There shouldn’t be one service to hold all of blogging; each writer should have his or her own domain and web site. But web sites also die all the time from neglect. We need centralized services to index and syndicate content so that it’s preserved and accessible to more people.
Longevity is the next great challenge for the web. All of my work on Riverfold apps is leading this way, from archiving tweets, to curating and publishing your best photos, to indexing a copy of the text and HTML from your blog. But I’m just one guy with a limited server budget.
It’s time for a new web standard — a metadata format and API that describes how to mirror published content. Maybe it’s part of IndieWebCamp? When I write on my blog, I want the content to flow to GitHub Pages, to the Internet Archive, to Medium. When I post photos, I want the content to flow to Dropbox, to S3, to Flickr. It’s not enough to backup or copy data blindly; the source must point to each mirror, and each mirror service must understand who the creator is and how to find the original data if it still exists.
Unlike a distributed platform that works at the level of raw data, like BitTorrent, this new system should work natively with well-understood common files: text, photos, video, and the glue (usually HTML, Markdown, or JSON) that makes a collection meaningful. Instead of yet another generic sync system, it’s a platform that understands publishing, with adapters to flow content into each mirror’s native storage.
If you accept that this is something worth doing, then every place we put our content must be classified as either an original source or a mirror. And this brings us back to Twitter. Because while I think the next 5 years for Twitter will be strong, I’m not convinced that it will last 50 years. Therefore, Twitter cannot be an original source of data; it must be just one of several mirrors for micro-blogging.
This essay was republished from the original version on manton.org.
