The H Line

Today I finished setting up my account with soup.io, an aggregator that displays all of your streams from your various accounts on one easy-to-digest page.

I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. I had a tumblelog on Tumblr, but was frustrated by its precarious position between blog and aggregator. I didn’t want something that looked like a blog without a comment option. I just wanted a page that I could direct people to and say, “Here. These are all of my accounts and there’s a stream of my latest stuff.” And that’s exactly what soup.io does.

It’s extremely easy to set up your page. You can test it out without even giving them your e-mail. They have several built-in options (flickr, del.icio.us, twitter, etc…), and also the option to add any RSS feed you like. In my case, I chose the RSS feed from this blog and my Clipmarks feed, in hope that it will give me more incentive to use it.

It’s not without its kinks, of course. The updates aren’t instantaneous — especially from a custom RSS feed — and they’ve temporarily disabled the custom CSS option after discovering some bugs. But that’s to be expected, and hasn’t inhibited my enjoyment of the service/site.

I think if there’s one big-picture kind of concern I have here, it’s that you don’t have to provide your password in order to have your accounts streamed. So someone could just as easily set up another soup.io account and stream my content on their page and say, “Look! Here’s all my stuff!” Those people would be liars. And liars are bad.

Personally, I’m pretty loose and carefree with my content, as long as people give me a link or some kind of credit — and even that’s flexible in certain situations. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that it could get out of hand.

However, it won’t.

I don’t say that because I think people are inherently good and the internet is a big cuddly bed that we crawl into so we can pass around pictures and songs and videos to one another in hope of making the world a happier place. I’m not that delusional. In this case, I just don’t think it’s enticingly naughty enough for a ne’er do well to even mess with. The result would only be mildly offensive, which is hardly worth the trouble.