At Ryan Kruder‘s suggestion, I decided to give “Blog It” a try. Blog It is SixApart’s Facebook app that allows you to update your various blogs, Twitter, and Facebook Status.

BlogIt is an interesting idea… Being able to broadcast your thoughts from one place outward is great. And, yet, doing it from within Facebook is a painful proposition on several fronts – mainly because Facebook itself is slow but also because the app lacks the WYSIWYG functionality of the blogging sites I’ve used before. Sure, I could use HTML, but why bother, when Blog It says, “Some services may remove tags that are not allowed.”? I also haven’t figured out how to tag posts from Blog It.

Ryan brings up a great question in his most recent post, “Do you think of Facebook as a destination for things other than interacting with your friends? What makes something a good FB app v. a stand alone destination site? Would you think of going to Facebook as the place where you write your blog posts?”

I’ve tried to use Facebook as a destination for other things before. When I consulted for SocialMedia Networks, I loaded and played with a ton of Facebook apps. The more apps I added, the slower Facebook got. And, it seems like the more apps I have on my profile, the more regularly the apps crash (which could be perception as opposed to reality). Regardless, performance probably won’t always be the case… As with all web services, I’m sure Facebook will only get faster as it evolves towards improved scalability.

For now, believe that any complex web services/ apps should remain stand alone destinations with the ability to somehow link to Facebook and other social sites. I’d like to see a bookmark mechanism within Facebook that allows me to click to my favorite sites and, ideally, add a button to them that I can press (or an automatic setting that I can establish) to let my friends know when I’ve been active on those sites. Having to go into Facebook to post a note that lets my friends know that I’ve updated my blog is one more step that I’d rather not go through.

Speaking of steps I’d rather not go through… BlogIt has gotten me to thinking… If SixApart can create a Facebook app that can simultaneously publish to Vox and TypePad, why can’t it create an upgrade mechanism that allows me to transfer my Vox blog into TypePad? I’ve been asking about this for a while, and no one has been able to suggest a way forward besides manual cut and paste, which would, after a year and a half of blogging, take forever. When I started blogging, I didn’t care who was reading or what posts generated the most interest. Now, I’m curious. I would love to transfer my account to TypePad and pay for extra features, but I don’t want to lose my existing posts or my URL.

Fingers crossed that since SixApart has demonstrated that it can push text up to multiple blog sites at once, they’ll soon offer vox users the opportunity to transfer/ upgrade their existing content to new platforms.