Twitter Experimentation
After refusing for quite some time, I’ve decided to give Twitter a try. This might prove short-lived, but we’ll see. I like the concept of easy status updates and of disconnecting them from a larger, clunkier framework, e.g. Facebook.
I’ll experiment with them for a while and see how I like it. So far, it’s interesting enough to try integrating them with my blog, which is why there’s now a grey line at the top that says “Status:” followed by my last twitter update. The placing and look are experimental, and we’ll see whether I change that, but for the moment I think that’s where it should go.
I’m using Alex King’s Twitter Tools, with some minor modifications (like giving the timestamp element a class of its own), to handle blog integration.
Apart form showing status on this blog, this will also post notifications about my blog posts to my Twitter status, which I’m not sure about. I guess it depends on how many people follow the blog but not my Twitter status, or vice versa—if there’s a lot of overlap between those two groups (as I suspect there will be) then I might disable that feature.
12 Feb 2009 at 18:13
Re: Blog posts -> Twitter status:
I am definitely not a fan of cross-posting for the most part. I use it selectively for some things (Twitter status posted to Facebook status, for example) but the “Hey, I’ve got a blog post!” posts strike me as unnecessary. Of course, one of my reasons for that is that I view Twitter less as a status update, and more as a large asynchronous chat room. Any auto-posting to Twitter, for me, breaks up the flow of conversation.
But of course, the beauty of simple apps like Twitter is that everyone chooses to use them differently, so don’t let my Twitter thoughts effect yours.
12 Feb 2009 at 23:18
Interesting, I haven’t looked at it as an asynchronous chat yet, and so far that would probably suit me less than as a status feed, so at the moment I’ll stick with the cross-posting; 5 auto-posts a week doesn’t seem like that much, although I guess that’ll depend on the volume of my status updates.
Which in turn adds a certain pressure to have an existence which tends to produce interesting status updates. Hmm.
13 Feb 2009 at 11:52
“Which in turn adds a certain pressure to have an existence which tends to produce interesting status updates. Hmm.”
Sounds like a plan to me!
19 Feb 2009 at 02:23
I also recently started to use Twitter, i will go with the flow and see how it goes. I Twitter tools for my blog.
Good luck to you.