Theresa O’Connor

cohost

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.