This is MarsEdit 3, which is finally supposed to bring WYSIWYG editing. I am composing in rich text in hopes that this will show up properly when I finally post.
I note also that it posts to almost every media source I mentioned in last night’s post – things like Tumblr and Typepad and WordPress and etc. This leads me to think that it might just be possible to build a system with MarsEdit and NetNewsWire (backed by the ubiquitous Google Reader of course) that would allow for spraying social media all over the place and then collecting it for reading elsewhere.
Da Wife (as she says) is not crazy about this. It is the opinion of ‘er indoors that she does not like RSS-based reading, by and large, and she makes a good case. For one thing, RSS is a thoroughly inelegant way of following Twitter. So use it for everything else? Well, too many sites do not offer a full feed – you get the first few lines only, or a prepared summary, or maybe text but no media, and you have to click on through anyway.
So why not Twitter? Everything feeds back to it just fine, it seems, and if you have to click through anyway, no big deal – perhaps Brizzly, which auto-expands links and images and the like, would make for a decent all-in-one reader. Plus, while Twitter is certainly as eager to monetize your data as Facebook, Twitter requires a much lower threshold of personal disclosure. (If you use a bogus name, and are lucky enough to have kept an email address for ten years or so that doesn’t tie back to you personally, you can use Twitter with a reasonable degree of anonymity short of somebody tracing IP and extrapolating from the people who tag you and etc.)
The problem with this is that inevitably you wind up needing multiple Twitter accounts, rather than breaking it out to have one service for some people, another for others, and so forth. All this could be fixed if Facebook still offered trustworthy granularity – but with no idea what they might decide is public record tomorrow, it would be the height of foolishness to entrust them with anything now. (I can already hear people crowing “well you shouldn’t put anything on the Internet!” Horseshit – the whole point of Facebook was that it WAS a walled and gated community, that WOULD allow you to control the precise distribution of your personal information. That they have blown this up is a fault of theirs, not of those who took them at their word.)
Anyway, it’s time to get out the clipboard and see how we’re going to make this work…