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One-to-Many Posting Options Still Lacking

I just recently (today) started using a service called Amplify that I learned about on Twitter. It’s supposed to let you easily share things across your social networks and provides a central place for discussion. I won’t get into too much detail about the specifics, but there is one major thing that instantly bothered me. Here is a screenshot of a post on my Ampblog regarding the RPM Challenge:

AmplifyRPM

Looks good, right? The bookmarklet is excellent. Let’s you select regions of the page and intelligently pieces them together into a baby blog post. I was impressed, until I took a look at how Amplify posted to my other services.

AmplifyTwitter

Ok, fair enough. Twitter doesn’t do images and is limited to 140 characters. This is good. I believe the URL is only that long because I hadn’t connected Bit.ly yet.

AmplifyFacebook

Uh, what’s this? It looks just like the tweet. I’m quite sure Facebook is capable of handling images and including thumbnails of stuff when you share it, so why is this Facebook share so bland?

AmplifyPosterous

Here is the Amplify post on my Posterous blog. Again, no images. Why is the good stuff being stripped away?

As you all may know, I’m a Ping.fm-aholic. It’s my go-to service when I want to speak to everyone everywhere. My problem with Ping.fm has always been that it doesn’t really do video and images (well, it does photos to flickr). I can’t be mad at that because Ping.fm wasn’t created that way. It’s all about status updates.

The other tool I use a lot for posting one-to-many is Posterous itself. It actually does do a better job of carrying over video and photos, but it has the same problem that Amplify does when it comes to Facebook. No Media!

PosterousFB

Well, sometimes photos show up, but videos don’t embed. Oh, I also have to run it through Feed-buster to get images in FriendFeed (yes, I still FriendFeed).

I am well aware that there are probably technological, underlying issues with getting media into Facebook and getting it to display nicely. I’m also aware that there may be issues with trying to get external images and video to show up on a 3rd party service. As a user, though, none of that matters. The point is still that I can’t share stuff the way I want. I have to settle for less…and that kinda sucks.

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Maximize Your Feeds with Feed-Buster

Being an avid FriendFeed user, I’ve had hours and hours of experience in figuring out what items will get attention there. One thing that most users will agree on is the fact that images will usually catch a viewer’s eye. Even before FriendFeed really opened the fire hose and made realtime the default, items with image thumbnails always seemed to get the most attention. Feed-buster is a web application that ensures your feeds are at their best. When you import a Feed-buster feed into FriendFeed, you’ll get all the images and video properly formatted and embedded. Check out this image to see what I mean. Which feed would you find more interesting?

fbDemoPic

This brings me to my experience with my Posterous blog. The reason Posterous has become so important in my workflow is that it allows me to simply forward interesting emails I get directly to my blog (@woodchuckonbass is one of my primary sources in that regard). Not only that, but Posterous automatically posts to all my social networks for me. Check out myPosterous getting started guide for more information.

The problem is that, whether you import your feed from Posterous or set up Posterous to post directly to FriendFeed, you can never ensure that all your images and videos will actually show up in FriendFeed. Feed-buster changes all that and should help with any other feeds that don’t seem to do what you want them to.

Feed-buster has definitely solved a huge problem for me, so maybe it can help enrich your online experience as well. Tell what you think in the comments.