Alex King posts about lowering the noise on Twitter. He suggests that Twitter change “What are you doing?” to “Say something interesting,” which works for me.
The truth of Twitter is that it is many things to many people and the beauty of it is that you can mold the Twitter experience to your own tastes. If I want to follow people who treat Twitter like a shorter-form blog, I can, or if I want to follow coworkers who keep everyone abreast of what they’re working on up to the minute, I can do that as well. Ultimately we all get to decide who’s interesting to us, and limit our Twitter experience to only those people. As Russell Beattie points out, that’s a powerful thing.
The thing I like about Twitter is that it’s much more conversational. I don’t know who reads my blog unless they leave comments, and most people whose blogs I read probably don’t know that I do so. On Twitter there’s a reasonable expectation that people who are following you read your tweets, and that there’s a decent chance that someone you address directly will read your tweet as well. It seems like that relationship makes it much easier to build a community quickly, as you find among LiveJournal users or Vox users if you use those sites.
We had that type of community when there were many fewer blogs. Many moons ago, it seemed like basically everybody read everybody else’s blog. I could pretty much guess who would link to my posts as I made them. If I could come up with one innovation, it would be a way to ease building communities among bloggers running their own sites the way you can with Twitter and other sites where everyone is swimming in someone else’s pool.
On Twitter and blogs
Alex King posts about lowering the noise on Twitter. He suggests that Twitter change “What are you doing?” to “Say something interesting,” which works for me.
The truth of Twitter is that it is many things to many people and the beauty of it is that you can mold the Twitter experience to your own tastes. If I want to follow people who treat Twitter like a shorter-form blog, I can, or if I want to follow coworkers who keep everyone abreast of what they’re working on up to the minute, I can do that as well. Ultimately we all get to decide who’s interesting to us, and limit our Twitter experience to only those people. As Russell Beattie points out, that’s a powerful thing.
The thing I like about Twitter is that it’s much more conversational. I don’t know who reads my blog unless they leave comments, and most people whose blogs I read probably don’t know that I do so. On Twitter there’s a reasonable expectation that people who are following you read your tweets, and that there’s a decent chance that someone you address directly will read your tweet as well. It seems like that relationship makes it much easier to build a community quickly, as you find among LiveJournal users or Vox users if you use those sites.
We had that type of community when there were many fewer blogs. Many moons ago, it seemed like basically everybody read everybody else’s blog. I could pretty much guess who would link to my posts as I made them. If I could come up with one innovation, it would be a way to ease building communities among bloggers running their own sites the way you can with Twitter and other sites where everyone is swimming in someone else’s pool.