With one update (or 'tweet'), Zude now cross posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Jaiku all at once
Going back to my post on the Twitterization of mainstream media whereby, instead of engaging in link-blogging, I'm using the short messaging service Twitter to post shorter news items to the right side …
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2007 the short-update format has already pulled prominent bloggers off long-form posting — Jason Calacanis wrote in March that most of his blogging had moved onto Twitter, and tools like TechCrunch-covered TwitBin were folding tweets into the browser. The question the format raises is fragmentation: a user active on Twitter, Facebook and Jaiku maintains three separate streams.
First-order effects
- Users juggling Twitter, Facebook and Jaiku accounts can maintain all three from a single Zude post instead of re-entering the same message three times.
Second-order effects
- The networks whose value lies in hosting the stream — Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku — now compete to be the canonical source while tolerating third-party redistribution of their own feeds via their APIs.
Third-order effects
- If one-to-many cross-posting becomes standard behavior, third-party broadcast layers sit between users and networks, weakening any single network's lock on the status update as a content type.
The trend: Status updating is consolidating into a portable microblogging layer, with independent tools broadcasting one message across rival social networks.