I’m always interested in exploring new ways to communicate. That means whatever the toy du jour is, I’m willing to give it a look, and stay if it’s proving worthwhile. Facebook, Twitter, Skype, IM - I’m using them all. And as a result, I’ve got a gazillion places that I can use for status updates.
If you’re in a similar situation, you know how annoying this is - I really don’t want to do the same status update on 15 webpages. For a long time, I’ve been only updating my Twitter page. It’s the most convenient one, just one key press away, thanks to Twitterific. A few days ago, Tim Bray was also wondering about different places to update your status. And one of his readers was kind enough to point out MoodBlast. It’s a wonderful little application that lets you post your status to a large number of services simultaneously.
Unfortunately, Facebook seems to have decided it might be a good idea to make legal threats against anybody who’s not using their approved API - which doesn’t support status updates. (Interestingly enough, Facebook has no problem employing the same techniques to scrape data from other applications, like gmail.)
This points out a fundamental problem of many web applications - your data is under the control of somebody else. Both import and export only happen at the whim of somebody else. And in Facebook’s case, that’s a 23-year old who seems to have power delusions.
This probably means I’ll abandon Facebook sooner or later, and I’ll definitely be re-evaluating all the web services I use if they provide open access to my data. I suggest you do the same - otherwise, more important data than your “status” might be locked away.