Did blogs fade from prominence because they did not have a sufficently attractive “app for that”?
From 2005-10 (ish) was there a “Twitter app for blogs” alternative, such as Micro.blog, Mastodon, 10Centuries, and Pine.blog? (other than just Tumblr)
@simonwoods Definitely not. You're overlapping with Google Reader's heyday there. Plus, you had Blogger and Wordpress.org and many others at that time.
Blogs faded because other things grew far more than blogs did. Most people don't want to write more than a little. Most people want other people to easily find their stuff, especially their friends. Most people don't want to pay. All of those are reasons why Tumblr was bigger than blogger eventually, why LiveJournal was big when it was big, and eventually, why Twitter and Facebook grew larger than any of them-- low effort, solid distraction, river of stuff that's interesting on the web for free has a broad audience than "place I publish my personal or professional thoughts."
@jsonbecker I think all of those things are true; whether we like it or not, most people want a centralised "town square" for certain conversations and announcements, and most people couldn't care less about ownership in general.
However, the alternatives you listed aren't exactly "app-able", you know? Certainly, it's not what I think of when I see Blogger, WordPress, and LiveJournal... though probably less so with Google Reader which I don't even know if it had an app? Generally speaking I have no idea because I wasn't involved in the broad social web back then, like, barely at all.
@simonwoods all of them were websites, but we were pre-smartphone and the idea it had to be out of the browser didn’t exist. What all of those tools had was a single place you went and logged in and could read widely without leaving that site. They had feeds, essentially, which is the key IMO.
@jsonbecker Right, that's what I thought. Although, the rise of the smartphone undoubtedly helped the silos; how could it not, when it made such a thing easier to access? That's the point I'm trying to get at, specifically in contrast to blogs, which now very much do have such apps even if they're still heavily dependent on browsers and computers.
@simonwoods discovery is always the problem. Mainstream wants an easy way to get an aggregated feed that's going to give them a fairly large exposure to the stuff they’re interested in, updated all the time. The separation of publishing and reading is an inherent challenge in the blog/RSS world versus mainstream audience.
It's telling that MarsEdit was a feature of NetNewsWire originally, and that they are, today, separate apps. There was a logic to AtomPub/Atom, RSS/MetaWeblog, Micropub/Microsub that never seemed to get up to the level of clients.
That's really what I see M.b as-- an earnest attempt to bring back together blog publishing standards along side subscriptions and mentions.
@bix I think the blog roll was a quasi feed— it pulled in previews of newest posts of other blogs with when they were updated. Less of a feed than say LiveJournal/Xanga etc, but still some idea of moving between interesting places without “leaving”
@jsonbecker Agreed. I suppose the open web wasn't as susceptible to VC-funded "move fast" ideals and so didn't latch onto the app-centric model as quickly as the silos.
@simonwoods I think most of the web, and most people, just missed how big mobile was going to be. There was a huge advantage to starting fresh, mobile first, at exactly the right time. There's no reason Tumblr is not what Instagram + Twitter is except they just missed their timing with mobile.
@jsonbecker Sounds about right. Even Manton has said that he wished he started Micro.blog earlier, specifically when he first left Twitter in 2012. Now that would have been interesting.