In the recent months, I have been working with @calebhailey.com to develop a new kind of workflow for posting to the Internet. Traditional social media has problems with content ownership, but what they get right is the user experience.
It is trivial to open up Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn or any number of other sites using their mobile app and make a quick post hit send and have it go live on a public facing feed somewhere on the Internet that other people can see.
Doing something this basic is unfortunately quite difficult if you own your own website and domain. Caleb and I think that’s a problem, and that you should be able to post to your own website as easily as you post to Twitter or Instagram.
You should also be able to enjoy the full expressive range of what a website can do, which means custom themes, layouts, and content types. Everything you might imagine that you could build on a content-forward website, whether that’s your personal blog or a company site for a local restaurant or services business, should’ve as easy to update as your Instagram feed.
To that end, we’ve created some technologies that allow you to build and maintain a static website through a simple mobile app experience, without locking you in to one narrow format, or locking you into our servers or services. That’s right, we don’t host your data, you do. We don’t own your data, you do.
Today is a pretty momentous occasion for this project: for the first time we have gotten the app to the point that someone can post through the app. And other than @calebhailey.com, I think I’m the first person to actually do it, and that post is the first post of its kind.
I’m sort of rambling on here, but to wit, I am using my phone’s dictation function to compose this, so I don’t even have to wear my thumbs out typing this lengthy blog post, LOL. Thumbs crossed that it works and everything goes great! If you’re reading this that means it worked!
After we get past this proof of concept, we have a lot more exciting things that we’re trying to bring to the Internet, all focused on giving you more control of your presence, presentation, and identity, carefully constructed to ensure that you engage on your own terms, not on the terms of some parasitic social media company.
For now, I’ll stop rambling and leave you with this quick awkward snapshot of our video call from earlier tonight as we worked out the last of the bugs.
