IMO cohost is
the most promising of the new social media sites people are turning to
as possible Twitter alternatives. Maybe I'm
biased—my friend jae (@jkap) is one of the
folks behind it (the
anti software software club)—but I really
think this is something worth looking into. Besides, it has the
most adorable mascot.
The culture that's developing on cohost is fun, irreverent, creative, funny, and inspiring. It reminds me more of Tumblr in its heyday than it does Twitter, to be honest, though perhaps with more shitposting. (Excuse me. I meant to say shitcoposting. Or maybe it's shitchosting. Ugh. Anyway.) Once early adopters realized you can commit all sorts of CSS crimes in posts, there's been an explosion of clever markup in posts and a number of tools built to help novices take advantage of it.
I'm @hober over there, which probably comes
as no surprise. I'm also @tess. (The early
bird gets the username, after all.) And jae and I both post to a page
about watches called
@hodykee.
One of the things that cohost gets right is the way it relates usernames
to accounts. Each account can post to multiple usernames, and each
username can be posted to by multiple accounts. It's a clever solution
to both Twitter alts and shared access that doesn't require you to
constantly log out and log back in again, nor do you have to share
authentication information with others. I can post to @hober, @tess,
or @hodykee without having to log out to switch accounts. Each of the
people on @staff can post there without
having to share any credentials with each other. It just works.