Here are a few of my favorite observations from Micro.blog this week:
Micromentaries
It was a big week for documentary-style microblogs. Ryan Runs, a microblog focused on marathon training, was an early example of this approach. Last weekend, Ryan successfully completed his first marathon! It was really interesting to follow along through the ups and downs of his journey, and it was fun to see many fellow microbloggers cheer him on and offer congratulations. Congrats Ryan!
Lyft Shifts, a newer microblog that documents the experience of being a Lyft driver, gained some momentum this week. If, like me, you’re one of those people who peppers your Lyft (yay!) or Uber (boo!) drivers with questions about the ins and outs of ridesharing, this account is for you. It’s fascinating to observe the dynamics at play among drivers, riders, and the services themselves.
The New MarsEdit
One big item on the ever-growing list of things I like about Micro.blog is that it gives me an opportunity to use MarsEdit again. (I’m using it to write this post, in fact.) I’ve owned MarsEdit for many years, but I hadn’t been using it as much until recently due to the fact that Squarespace doesn’t support third-party blogging clients.
It was fun to see how much chatter there was on Micro.blog this week about the launch of MarsEdit 4. @manton and @danielpunkass have joked on the “Core Intuition” podcast that they are technically competitors now, since both MarsEdit and the Micro.blog Mac app can be used to post to Wordpress and Micro.blog-hosted sites.
But this is another great example of how “official” apps and third-party apps can both thrive. I love using the Micro.blog Mac app for checking my timeline and publishing quick posts and replies. But I much prefer MarsEdit for longer posts. There are also certain things that are literally only possible on Micro.blog-hosted sites with MarsEdit, like viewing a live preview before publishing, saving drafts, and creating posts with alternating text and photos. I’m also finding MarsEdit really useful for making clean-up edits to some older posts I migrated over from Squarespace.
Music Curation
I’ve mentioned before that I struggle with music discovery and really enjoy seeing music-related conversations and recommendations on Micro.blog. These are continuing to pop up regularly, and I’ve particularly loved the cases where people have served up Apple Music playlist links that I could check out with a couple of taps.
For example, @endonend put together a great “Best Music from 2017” playlist, and @zak made some updates to his ongoing “ZaxTrax” playlist.
