ℹ️ This is an archived legacy site for link purposes only.
Over the holidays I decided to pause the Shrtnws experiment. It’s been great fun and the response has been positive, but the next step is too big at the moment. For those of you who’ve missed it, Shrtnws sent interesting and breaking news in short form, with a link for additional reading and/or source, through Twitter, Facebook, App.net and Tumblr. Additional plans, such as a daily (and later weekly wrap-up) newsletter were on the plate, and technically ready to launch, but I decided not to.
Shrtnws was a small project that I built along with my Odd Alice friends at an event called 24 Hour Business Camp. It was great fun to build, and the end result was pretty cool. Basically, it was short news delivered to you through the site, or on Twitter and/or Facebook. There were several (five or six) topics that you could follow, and you got the very most important news in each of these.
We ran Shrtnws for a month or so, with paying sponsors I might add, but then decided to call it quits. There just wasn’t time enough, and due to changes with APIs, along with a publishing method that took a little bit too much tinkering when you were mobile, we shelved the project.
I was never comfortable with dropping the project, but reality is what it is. Much like I had to shelve the Appricorn project due to the ongoing changes within the App Store, we had to do the same with Shrtnws at the time. (more…)
Flipping through my RSS feed I was once again reminded that being first isn’t always the key to success. In this case it was web publishing, and Boing Boing in particular. The blog had just run a post about how Darth Vader tackled the Hoth battle in The Empire Strikes Back, originally a Wired story. I had seen the story being mentioned at least a dozen times already, over a 24 hour (or something like that) period of time.
In conclusion, Boing Boing was late on the ball, which you might think was embarrassing considering this is a pretty typical Boing Boing story.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter.