Not entirely sure about that William, at least for me. I’m more interested in content ingest.
I’m not a fan of “boosting”, “reposting”, or whatever each network calls it without additional steps. It’s actually one of the problems I see with social media in that it’s too easy to amplify content without adding anything (thought included) to the conversation.
I do agree that I would love to have a system whereby my social graph, and content is available for ingestion, and I can write about it and post to a blogging platform, or mastadon, all from the one place. That would be awesome :)
I must admit that I’ve known about Reader, which is the WordPress.com tool for following blogs, for years now, but never realised it worked for sites that were not hosted on WordPress infrastructure. It actually allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and import OPML files.
I only discovered this functionality today when I decided to have a poke around after spying a post about a new feature called “Recommended Blogs”. It’s essentially a blogroll for your Reader profile.
Now I feel like a bit of an idiot for ignoring Reader for the past few years. Not only can I import all of my subscriptions from my current RSS reader, but I can easily reblog (republish or quote) parts of them on my own blog directly from within the interface, and can even write a post from within the feed.
I don’t have to switch to another service to find content to write about, and it’s all available on the web and in the Jetpack app on my phone.
I’m going to have to spend a few days actually using it as my main RSS reader to decide if the convenience is worth jumping ship for, but for now, I’m pretty impressed.
