Soup turns big ideas into teeny blogs
Teeny, tiny blogs! Make 'em with Soup.
Soup is a microblogging service, very similar to Tumblr (review), which gives users a quick and easy blog to post all sorts of small bits of content to. It also lets you plug in any old RSS feed, or add your user name on popular services like Digg, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, and Twitter to have your activity on any of the sites automatically republished to your Soup blog. The goal is to have an easy-to-use blog that doubles as a visual feed-hub of your content publishing habits on other services.
Like Tumblr, there's an integrated community. You can have friends whose Soup blog posts get thrown together into a master feed. There's also a neat feature where you can repost anything that's on their Soup blogs onto your own with a single click. Soup also posts everyone's newest posts to the site's front page if they've made their blog publicly available.
Setting up the service is a snap, and Soup even lets you create an entire blog before requiring you to register for an account. There are five themes to skin your blog with, along with a color chooser that lets you tweak every aspect of the page. Sadly missing, however, is a way to resize the width, as all of the themes are almost excessively narrow, which ultimately makes reading longer text stories a pain.
Soup is worth a spin if only to play with its editing interface, which is slick and functional. Feature-by-feature Tumblr's got it beat, but both accomplish the same thing with a fun, care-free feel. How things like Twitter and the Facebook status message have created this new style of fitting as much "oomph" into a small space fascinates me. It's a writing style with such stringent limitations on its structure, that it's almost like a haiku.
[via Read/WriteWeb]