Thursday, August 28, 2008

Life Streaming and Sweetcron

Sometimes I hang back a bit before trying out a new application, especially in a crowded app space (another X app?). At other times I seem to jump in at the beginning. The past couple of days there has been a lot of talk about Sweetcron (no not corn, cron) even though it wasn't released until this morning. This afternoon I downloaded the latest version (already 5 revs out from the version I downloaded this morning) and installed it at http://www.goldiekatsu.com which until now just had a placeholder wordpress blog that said come here for more.

Sweetcron bills itself as an "Automated lifestream blogging service." What that translates to is - a way to create your personal friend feed friend on your website and throw in a blogging tool on top of it. The visual style lends itself to a "tumblr" sort of blog, and it will throw in whatever feeds you send it.

I set it up and threw some feeds at it and looked at the result. It is an interesting seeing my "output on the net" in a sequential format. You can see when I blogged relative to my tweets and plurks and photos and whatnot. Even though this isn't that different from friend feed, somehow the visual format, and having it on my host as my website made it a different experience. The stark list made me look at what I was putting out on the web, and variety there was or wasn't in that output.

Interestingly I have never done a "today's tweets" post because I tend to think of my twitters as primarily chatter and conversation and not something to list daily as something of consequence. Ironically on the website that bears my name, that is exactly what most of the content is. 140 characters is much easier to write than most other output.

Right now my sweetcron is an experiement, and it has proved to be a bit of an exercise in self reflection. What am I putting out there on the web, and is it what I want to be the reflecton of me?

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