Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - very cool to see @davewiner joining in

It's been fun to see Dave Winer's experiments in content syndication with Little Facebook Editor, a proof of concept that allows you to write a post in a minimalist text box (which I love), cross-post to Facebook, and update the Facebook version when updates are made.

We've had content syndication in Known since the beginning. So far we have plugins for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare and SoundCloud in-house, and our open source community has also contributed one for WordPress. I love that Dave's software keeps the post up-to-date as well as cross-posting it. This is something we'll be adding for the platforms that support it (i.e., everything but Twitter).

I completely agree with Dave when he says:

I want Facebook to become a first class publishing surface, accessible from tools that run outside the Facebook environment. With this, the tools can overcome one major objection, that they don't connect with the powerful engagement features of Facebook, and the huge user base. And, even more important, it will make it possible for new tools to gain traction, because users will not have to choose between an attractive idea and all their readers and friends. They can have both.

We believe that this should be true for all of our social networking tools. Our sites should hold the primary copy of our content - it's ours, after all. But these networks wield massive reach and power, and we should be able to leverage that to find new audiences and meet new people. We're not trying to replace Facebook; we're trying to use it to its full potential.

I'm really looking forward to more updates on the Little Facebook Editor. To stay up to date with Known developments, click here to add yourself to our beta list.