Get your very own Perpetuum Webile!
The social web is all about user participation, right? Well, maybe. Kind of. But the truth is that the web 2.0 these days is all about syndication: call it cross-, auto- or whatever-posting, feeds are running wild. Just take friendfeed: ff posts to facebook, twitter posts to facebook… soup.io, an Austrian Startup, also has nice and nifty auto-syndication features. The same can be said about tumblr. So what happens when you let these two mighty beasts battle, umm, I mean talk to, each other?
Would one achieve eternal RSS action Zen that way? Yes, it is that simple, actually – you don't even have to spend the best years of your live in a monastery:
- Set up an account at Soup.io, one at – and if you wish, one at friendfeed.
- Enter your tumblr username in soup.io's “external services” list, then enter the soup.io feed as an external tumblr feed. Optional: link both feeds to your new friendfeed account (rss sources).
- No third step, you're done: you just built your very own perpetuum webile!
What's going to happen? Let's say you post something on soup. It then gets repostet on tumblr, which again triggers a posting at soup which in turn… you get the point. And friendfeed documents it all. Ain't that great? Finally, the human factor has been eliminated from the communication formula. When I was a kid, one needed an analogue cam, a TV and a darkened room to achieve endless loop-back effects; the results were more vivid, and the visual far more interesting though than my perpetuum webile. I tried this, check it out:
perpetuumwebile.soup.io/
perpetuumwebile.tumblr.com
perpetuumwebile.tumblr.com
What really happens is rather boring though: after a couple of reposts the whole process comes to and end: virtual entropy is kicking in… no endless fun.
Can you think of any other such feedback-mechanisms? Of course I integrated my tweets, my friendfeed *and* my blog with my facebook accounts – now triple actions are swarming all around. A hash key as lowest common denominator could probably subdue the chaos – but for now let's rejoice and look forward to the age of machines that are almost as dumb as humans: a true scientific breakthrough.