



And as much as I see people prompting "When are you going to have themes?", while I'd love them, I'm just fine without. The rest (as they say) is gravy.
Although, not sure I agree that Posterous is the ideal Hub. I use the above Hubs to populate my Spokes: Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, BrightKite, Plurk, Laconi.ca, Identi.ca, Bebo, Flickr, Posterous, Linkedin and LastFM.
The reason for the multiple Hubs is the same reason other commenters mentioned of the ability for these Hubs to control which Spokes the content posted should be directed to.
Ping.fm is the closes one that does this but still not robust enough compared to the other Hubs I use above.
I like the Hub and Spoke model generally (Postling is this way), but I think there are some critical details.
1. Your participation in various communities must be authentic. Your community can quickly and easily tell you are auto-posting, and if you don't spend the time to log in and engage with that community specifically, you'll be cast out. Unless you're a celebrity :)
2. You participate in each community for slightly different reasons (otherwise, why are you there?). Some are about tech, some about photography, or food, or sports. So if you are auto-posting tech posts to your food community, you've failed to be authentic (see #1).
3. This also is true for twitter / facebook status updates. If your updates are nothing more than the first 100 chars of your blog post and a bit.ly link, your audience will notice (again, see #1).
When we designed Postling, we built this in. Matching my points above with features below:
1. We aggregate all comments into one place, so you can engage your commenters on the right platform. We currently support Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Squarespace, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Sorry, no Disqus (yet) because their API doesn't quite let us do what we need it to do.
2. With Postling, you choose which blogs you want to post to. Sometimes a post is only appropriate for your personal blog. Others are for both your professional and your personal blog. You have control.
3. Once you make a post, you can customize the facebook and twitter status update that announces your latest post.
Anyway, just some thoughts on community building vs. hub and spoke auto-posting.
Thanks for the great blog, Steve, I've been a long time reader.
Big issue: more noise. But isn't that what happens all the time allover? Filtering and aggregation of relevant channels seems important to me.
Choosing one method over the other is strictly dependent on what individual users are trying to accomplish and I see both continuing and flourishing. While the ability for Posterous to offer a post once / publish everywhere metaphor is great, some may find the current suite of tools and supported services limiting.
I feel that there can still be ways to incorporate aggregation from external services effectively that open up ways to increase the quantity and quality of content to be shared. I feel that whether you are publishing outwardly from your hub or importing inwardly, either can effectively provide the same result.
I experimented with all sorts of syndication models FB-FF-Posterous-Tumblr-Twitter-self hosted blog (by the way that wall diagram doesn't makes sense the self hosted blog is not a dead end wall); one syndication model does not service how I focus my interests online. That brings me to "lifestreaming". Outside of this silo (and this blog does exist within a tech/marketing silo) people talk about their kids, grocery shopping, fashion, pop culture, laundry, politics, religion, art, food, tech, vacations, relationships etc… "Lifestreaming" is mix of everything, the focus being on the individual and his/her relationship with family, friends, and like online communities. That's precisely where the signal begins and the noise ends. Most "lifestreams” on Posterous and Tumblr as I see them in practice are not nearly as focused as Micro Persuasion II on Posterous. And therefore, more noise than signal, regardless of the platform.
That brings me to my question, to an outside audience, without the personal/physical relationship that shapes the meaning and context of a signal, how is Posterous or any other distribution service/model NOT pure syndicated noise?
I like Posterous very much as a way to deliver content to various social sites.
On the flip side, I have been trying to find a way to aggregate my online presence meaningfully. My blog is for work; my tumblog/posterous is fun stuff; Twitter and Facebook are some of each.
I am now experimenting with an Arktan widget to put the lifestream stuff on my blog in a simple way.
http://blog.jparkhill.com/lifestream/
It's a little ugly right now; the widget looks better here.
http://janyaa.org/onlineactivity.php
The tools let me filter my own content and present it the way I want to.
(I have no financial or other interest in Arktan; I just like the product).