JF Martin

March 5, 2021

HEY World — Message in a Bottle

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Today, HEY World came to (numeric) life. When I’m thinking about this new service, the image above exemplify the thing that comes to my mind. What is simpler than putting a message in a bottle in today’s world? HEY World for bloggers or writers like me is exactly the kind of frictionless experience that we are constantly looking for. The world is complicated, no need to add more complexity.

HEY World has no tracking, hence no analytics to look for. I’ll never know how many people will read the message in the bottle or subscribe to this newsletter. Never. But is it important? It should matter. You won’t find any ads either. Oh, thanks god. What a breath of fresh air where content is front and center. There will never be fancy visuals when visiting the newsletters archive. From one archive to the other, only the author name and avatar will be different (and the words they contains, obviously). With HEY World, words are at the center, the rest is frivolous. Interested readers can subscribe, using their email address or by consuming the RSS feed that comes with the service. What can be simpler than this?

As my excitement for HEY World settles a bit, the following questions will need to find an answer, and fast: what will be my use of HEY World? What kind of content will I publish that wouldn’t fit my other conduits? What is this service bringing to my numeric life that others can’t already provide? How many services like this can a blogger have? After all, I’m already using WordPress (too complex), Micro.blog (much lighter, yet...), Substack (trendy but still...), Blot (so simple, but very geeky), Medium ($$$). Did I miss any?

One last thing: I’ll never know if this message finds its way to a reader, and how many of them there will be, but if someone reads it, please, do me a favour, and simply reply to it (you must have subscribed by email in order to be able to do so, though), I’ll get your message, then, maybe I’ll respond to your comment, and so on. Are you getting it? This could become a private thread. That’s the way HEY World is set up, and I think it’s really cool.

Oh, I’ll subscribe to other people too and add their feed in News Explorer under a new folder called “HEY World”. Can’t wait to see what others have to say!

JF Martin aka Numeric Citizen.

I think I’ll have to update the following soon...
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