wonder what it would be like if i opened…

sull 2:41 PM on August 17, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

Category: macroblog | Tags: ideas, short url (5), twitter (17), wordpress (20)

wonder what it would be like if i opened up this domain, vocal.ly, for others to use as a way to share links with commentary. in other words, if you want to share a link, you would use a vocally bookmarklet or just login to this wordpress mu site and write a short post with the link you want to share. the post would get published to your twitter, @vocally and obviously posted on this site. the link that gets posted to twitter etc would be a vocal.ly short url instead and people would read your comments and see the full url that they can follow and/or leave a comment on the vocal.ly post.

not a replacement for rapid url sharing but does nudge people to have a threaded discussion off of twitter while being safer since you know the link will hit the vocal.ly multi-user wordpress blog where you can see the long url and participate in discussions.

http://a.tinythread.com is a little side project of Delicious founder Joshua Schachter and has had some decent momentum as a simple place to have discussions initiated by a tweet. well i suppose this is the same idea except it would use WordPress and have a built-in short url. Could also include a secondary short url for the url that is referenced in the post. Like vocal.ly/go/qwe for remote url and vocal.ly/rty for the local post.

this sounds like it would be best if it were a wordpress plugin for WPMU.

something to think about at least.

sull 1:22 AM on August 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply

btw, this was also digg.com thinking when they changed their short url system to redirect to digg.com pages instead of to the destination url. i agreed with digg at the time but they got hammered by some tech blogs for the change. digg was never a bit.ly, though some wanted to make a direct comparison. bit.ly, more likely, will end up more like digg if they want to evolve their service in a social way.

returning to the point…. i suppose my thinking on using vocal.ly as a pass-through domain for sharing links, context and comments is nothing more than a bloggy digg or reddit. it’s still an interesting idea and possibly a fun way to share this domain.
sull 6:07 PM on August 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

just read – “Why I Don’t Use Twitter” – http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/why-i-dont-use-twitter/ –

this excerpt relates to this post about making vocal.ly a pass-through service for sharing links so context can be added, discussion can be had and actual urls can be seen instead of blindly following links.

“But the tweet can have a link in it, of course, which makes it more versatile — except links are subject to the same value reductions as simple text. Tweeting a link is a lot like sending it to your whole address book. If you think everyone you know should see it, it better be worth shouting from the mountaintops. How rare that is! If you like other people finding your content for you, on their schedule, this isn’t a problem, but for me it is. Add in the fact that probably half of tweets are automatically generated, and what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate anything of value.

The natural objection to this is that you choose to follow people, you don’t have it forced upon you. True! I say, then, if someone is so regularly finding content of merit, why don’t they have a blog where the content can be given context, discussion, and perhaps a preview so people aren’t going in blind? I like reading interesting blogs. I don’t want to receive links every time someone find something they think everyone should see. Twitter just adds another layer to the equation — and I don’t like layers.”

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