Sunday 19 December 2010

Is Twitter the future?

Username:  @LondonRaven64
I've finally joined Twitter. I'm blundering about on it at the moment as I don't really know what I'm doing! I had signed up originally to follow some of the recent university occupation tweets. Man, as if I need another distraction on the web...

It does have its uses. It was bizarre that the other evening at home I had to read on Twitter that it was snowing in Eltham, causing me hurriedly to look outside and see that it was true!

There are quite a few active local Tweeters - for example, @, @AdamBienkov, @nigelfletcher - some of them count as Twitter aristocracy. The trouble is that you naturally want to sign up to follow the ever more interesting Tweeters that you comes across through other accounts, and then you end up with tons of tweets - some good, others less so.

It was a co-incidence that I've signed up at the time when the value of blogging is being questioned, and when the legendary blogging guru Iain Dale has announced he's giving up blogging. It's interesting though that many of the most successful Tweeters are also prolific bloggers.

I have found that Twitter and Blogging are quite different, both as a producer and consumer. Each has their place at the moment, but for how long?  Will the quick fix of the rapid-fire 140 characters satisfy over the longer, more leisurely meal of a blog post?

3 comments:

Londonbackpacker said...

I think as a blogger that it is helpful to be on some of the social networking sites, it can help to bring more information to you and this can then help with writing new blog posts.

It is always useful for when you have something to say but its not really big enough for a blog post it can be put out on twitter and still get commented on.

George

. said...

After initial scepticism I have found that I do hear about lots of stuff in real time via Twitter, and it does increase traffic to the blog. But for me it only works as a complement to a blog rather than an alternative - anything worth saying takes more than a 140 characters.

raven said...

No danger of Twitter taking over yet then it seems.

I very much agree with the points you both make - it's good for making a 'quick hit' (when you've no time/interest/material to blog), it's a quick way of scanning real-time happenings but blogging is a different 'art' (dare I say).

The difficulty I'm having is what to do, when you've not accessed Twitter for some period (could be a half-day or more, sacre bleu!) and you're then faced with 100+ new messages. Do you ignore them and start again, or go through them all? Tricky. I guess you just have to treat it like a kind of ticker-tape (but supposing some tweets were addressed to you? Argghh.) I'll find my way through I guess.