Today Colleen did an interesting post about different ways she provides for people to follow her blog. For her, of course, it is a commercial decision. She has a business to promote and she wants to catch as many people as possible. I’m somewhat less enthusiastic.
I do, of course, have the LiveJournal echo of this blog. I wish I didn’t have to do it, but there are just too many people I know who won’t read blogs any other way. I also cross post the blog to Facebook, and I suspect that there is another group who would stop reading me if I didn’t do that. Now Colleen has a bunch of other suggestions. Will there be communities who only follow those services too?
I’m not convinced by MyBlogLog. It doesn’t help that everything that Yahoo does looks crappy, and the stats are of no use if only a small fraction of my readers join that system. Blogger’s “Follow me” only works for blogs hosted on Blogger. As for FeedBlitz, what is the point in going back to email?
Which leaves us with Twitter. I know that an awful lot of my friends are on it. I’m not. I waste quite enough time each day with other things. I certainly wouldn’t want to use it to follow people’s twitting. I could (because I know that there are plugins that do it) arrange for a twit to be posted each time I add a post here, but having looked through the introductory material on the Twitter web site it is clear that they don’t want people using their system that way.
The trouble is that each one of these systems wants to be the One True Social Network. They want people to use them and only them. So they provide a whole bunch of things that you can only do inside their system. And really, I don’t have the time. I already ignore the vast majority of things that come my way on Facebook.
Then again, Twitter is very popular, and it might actually be useful when I’m at conventions and the like. (Though it may start to cost me a fortune in txting fees.) So what do you folks think. Are there people out there who would like to have a Twitter feed of this blog? Can anyone suggest any other reason why I might want to get involved in yet another time sink?
I just jumped on the Twitter bandwagon last week as part of a work group project. That said, I use it to augment my blog.
I don’t tend to post ultra short stuff, but occasionally I do have ultra short snarky thoughts, perfect for twitter. I installed a WP feed widget on my blog so it’s a new sidebar piece. I integrated it to Facebook as well, managing statuses to both with one system. I also use twitter through a 3rd party app (twhirl in my case), which it seems most users do, making adoption easier.
I also have updates TO twitter via txt turned on, but updates FROM twitter va txt turned off, so I can read them via my twitter client at my leisure. It manages the cost and the impact on my free time.
The advantages are that I can also send info & questions out via twitter for feedback on a more real time basis than my blog – think tank questions, or new blog post PR. The disadvantages include the procrastination/time sink issue, and as you noted, the further fragmentation of my attention across the social media spectrum.
My thinking – and I’m still in testing mode – was that I can play with it for a couple of weeks, and if I hate it after testing the waters, I’ll delete my account and stay on dry land. 🙂
If you text message, and you write about your every little activity of the day, Twitter is useful.
There are also some good business uses of Twitter, whether it’s telecommuters using Twitter to build the camaraderie and chatter that’s not there when the company doesn’t have everybody together everyday, or to post status and emergency updates to large groups of customers.
I’m not interested, myself (although I’m considering talking to my management about using it as an outage/uptime notification tool)
There’s no way to twitter your whole blog directly, though; individual entries can only be 140 characters so at most you could twitter your entry title and a link.
I tend to use twitter for news updates throughout the day — and for touching bases with some folks I might not otherwise — but I’m *at* a computer much of the day — if I weren’t, twitter wouldn’t work at all.
I was slow to jump on the twitter bandwagon, but having done so I’ve come to appreciate it. It is a completely different community from the blogging community, I think.
I use Twitter as the snarky friend who is always with me. You know, that moment when you see something odd and you wish you had someone to share it with? That’s what twitter is for. I do NOT update with “I’m having lunch” unless there’s something remarkable about the lunch.
It’s also been good the past day because a friend of mine went into the hospital with heart trouble and was keeping us all posted via Twitter. Welcome to the world of SF now.
For me twitter is equally a business/ data tooland a friend tracker.
I read tweets of people whom are in some way related to topics that I need or want to track and follow perhaps 15 links a day to things I read.
The one I most recommend is @TimO’Reilly
Socially, many of my nonbloggy friends post there and it is easier to keep a glimpse on their lives.
Besides, it ain’t 1/8 the timesuck that LJ is.