After playing with Twitter for a couple months now, I’ve decided that it’s really not all that useful as a way to express my thoughts and feelings. I spend a lot of time trying to come up with witty zingers, but nothing I say ever generates any real commentary. My gut feeling is that very few people actually read what I tweet, which is a little humbling and disappointing. More and more it feels like I’m screaming into an ever-more-crowded room filled with people screaming. We’re all trying to out-scoop or out-zing each other, in 140 characters or less.
Conversely, this blog has always felt like a calm, collected place where I can express my thoughts and interact with a small group of interested readers. The majority of my posts generate little traffic and zero comments, but I know they’re read by my close friends. However, I’ve had several blog posts that have generated a great deal of commentary. I provided some thoughtful analysis, and people felt compelled to comment (often after some baiting on Hacker News or Twitter). The readers learned from my experiences, and they added their thoughts. The postings remain visible and can be easily found via Google. Finally, many of the posts still generate traffic and comments even months or years after the original posting. Try getting response to a tweet even 6 hours after the original posting.
For these reasons, I’ve decided that I’m going to reduce my time spent on Twitter and instead try to collect my thoughts into real, thoughtful writing. If I feel the itch to go tweet about something shiny, I’m going to ask myself if it’s something that I really think people care about, or am I just acting under the same impulse as the people who write “First!” in comments on Youtube. I’ll still succumb every now and then, but I think I’m over Twitter.
Update: I’ve also found that going on a massive un-follow campaign can vastly improve your Twitter experience. Clear out all the cruft: celebrities, brands, logos, and especially the chatty egoists who never shut up. Once you pare it down to just friends and a handful of personalities, Twitter is much more enjoyable.
June 10th, 2009 at 7:26 am
I’ve always followed your tweets, but I see what you mean. If someone doesn’t RT or reply to one of mine, I feel like I’m farting into the wind.
June 10th, 2009 at 8:27 am
If people are reading your blog, that’s good enough. All good reasons above to keep going
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
June 10th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Ha!
Of those 5% that had been updated, I wonder what percent had the most recent update as, “Sorry I’ve been away. I’ll be back to blog very soon!”
June 10th, 2009 at 10:19 am
I tried following people on twitter but it fails to capture my interest. If you have something important to say, say it on your blog. Otherwise I’ll never see it.
I don’t consider twitter a blog replacement. Maybe it could supplement it, or help gather info, but the end result is the blog post.
June 10th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I’m with you on Twitter, but I took it a step further and completely dropped it. I think Twitter’s immediacy and simpleness makes it more about people talking than people listening. The ratio is still too unbalanced.
June 10th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
I could never see Twitter taking the place of blogs. And while very few people probably see anything I tweet, as someone who is sometimes working alone, I see Twitter much like the on-going open conversations that can take place in offices, where you pipe up with a random thought, or simply jump in on a discussion that happens to catch your attention. A substitute water-cooler rather than anything to be taken *too* seriously