The Steve Rubel Stream

I sure love the concept you describe, Steve and I can't wait to try it out.

Twitter's downtime forced me to rethink my social media usage. So, I joined identi.ca, and revisted plurk.com.

My colleague and social media consultant Carmina Perez and I chatted a little about this in our weekly social media video (youtube.com/mogulette). The takeaway is that companies that are doing customer service and other critical work on Twitter, well, this is a good sign that it is clearly time to diversify and it's time to help/convince/remind your Twitter followers to also join you in other channels like your e-mail lists, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc..

Lock-in to one vendor is never a good thing, even Twitter. Be nice if the open-source microblogging movement gets traction. Twitter's outage showed us that this is a tool we need in the digital world and it has to be reliable.

I've detailed how I implemented my social media safety net here http://bit.ly/8CeUj Long story short, when you rely on hosted services alone (even posterous!), you never "own" your content.

Yep, already doing it. And following all of you here on posterous (you know who you are LOL) is the fuel for my fire. Posterous is quite simply the tool that I cannot do without right now. FF is nice but like Twitter is dominated by a few heavyweights who dominate the airwaves and don't let smaller voices be heard. Facebook is a nice way to keep in touch with personal friends (and also to reconnect with lost ones). But it's not really a publication vehicle and certainly not a business tool as their founders would like you to believe.

Posterous, in addition to being a great and fluid platform for thoughts and ideas, is far more democratic in process, allowing the small voice to be heard and enjoined with the big voices - a use that seems to be the one for which it was intended. The constant evolution of the product, the way its founders participate and actually use the service, are examples of this greatness. When was the last time Biz or Evan or whomever made a salient post on their respective services that actually got you excited (well maybe announcing you were going to be on Oprah counts, really not sure)?

Posterous is awesome and useful and participatory. QED.

Some very important issues being raised here. I think I still fall back on blogging Steve. The "owning" issues and the rest. I am looking forward to hearing you discuss this at length.

Jim, I agree with the whole "owning your content" thing - which is why I moved my blog from blogger to a self managed Wordpress blog. But I get around this issue by cross posting from Posterous to my cjsparno.com blog which I own, ensuring the data will be there for me if Posterous does something nutty, which I imagine they will not (but you never know). How was that for a disclaimer ;)

Sharing inanities seems unproductive-doubled.
Knowing enough on a subject to share limits the amount and number of sharings.
How can I find all those wonderful, smart, practical, considerate people who agree with me?

How about just getting my tweets back since 5,000 of them disappeared?? :( http://bit.ly/1WFqlP

Yesterday, I decided to go hardcore and setup Sweetcron for lifestreaming. It sucks down all my Tweets, flickr photostream, delicious bookmarks, RSS feed I throw its way, etc. It's like Friendfeed (sorta) that you host. I keep my Sweetcron lifestream but now have a public Friendfeed. http://bit.ly/WvXfP