m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

I’ve been wanting crossposting software for a while now. People I’d spotted successfully crossposting either did it manually in a browser or worked for Google (solving the Google+ problem through nepotism?), and Hootsuite only handled a couple of my networks. Streamified did more but still not all (and is temporarily without an iOS client).

Drafts does more too, but also lets me do it all—even save the markdown to Dropbox for later inclusion in my Jekyll blog—all from my iPad. This is my first blog post using Drafts, but I’ll also edit it later for some other streams.

So, isn’t crossposting evil? The short answer is it’s evil when businesses do it for their financial (as opposed to social) purposes, or when trolls do it to rile up one newsgroup with a discussion more appropriate to the source group (or to no place at all). It’s also evil when the crossposter is himself largely responsible for the fragmentation of the community (say, an excessive proliferation of mailing lists on the same topic) that he then needs to crosspost across in order to have a discussion.

It’s not so evil when the crossposter is innocent of the fragmentation of his community—say, some of them won’t use Facebook and others don’t use mailing lists (or any of them are lawyers). In the case where businesses are intentionally using your content to keep people in their own advertisement-filled silo (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.), crossposting is the pro-social option. Bonus points if you also point your siloed readers to an especially pro-social forum (App.net, Tent, etc.).