Blogging, microblogging, miniblogging, moblogging, vlogging. What next? Humans are social creatures, and as such, we like to express ourselves, usually verbally, but print will do, whether on paper or online. Science Fiction legend Harlan Ellison wrote a story called I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, which isn’t relevant other than for me to suggest that Twitter and its alternatives will always find a following, even if we end up with a dozen of these tools. (Though there must be some saturation point, since at some point they have to monetize their service. I doubt all of them can be profitable.)
The latest to the collection of Twitter-like digital soapbox tools is Meshly. Webware describes Meshly as a “nanoblogging platform” built around instant messages. And Meshly lets you vote on each item posted. Right, sort of like Digg, but on each tiny little message. Sorry, but you’d have to have no life whatsoever to want to watch and vote on minutiae of thoughts. (Am I missing something?) Take away the silly voting, however, and I think this could actually be useful.
So we have Twitter/ Jaiku/ Tumblr from a web browser, MySay from cell phones, Meshly from IM clients, and who knows what else. And I’ve just registered a domain where you’ll soon be able to post to your lifestream thoughts and posts just by imagining your text. You will, however, have to attach a USB cable to your noggin. Then anyone can know all of your thoughts, all of the time. I have a mouth and I plan to scream.
Originally posted on April 25, 2007 @ 1:04 pm
You just got Twittered by Scoblelinkblog. congratulations from Vaspers the Grate (as in abrasive, not terrific)
Okay, I take it back :) Meshly is like Twitter over IM for bookmarks, del.icio.us, and digg rolled into one. Now it makes sense.
Hey thanks for the review. I hear your point about voting on every little thought. I don’t think I would vote on whether or not it was cool that someone had CoCo puffs for breakfast.
That said, the posts to Meshly are not just thoughts, but links. Its essentially a social bookmarking platform that you can post to via IM. We are planning on adding a way to post via the site as well in a future release. You can track what we are up to on our blog at http://meshly.blogspot.com/.
If you have any more suggestions as to ways to make Meshly better or more useful please drop us a note. Or contribute to the MeshlyDev channel at
http://www.meshly.com/channel/meshlydev.
Thanks again,
Dave