According to the Dashboard of my blog I’ll have made 598 blog posts once this entry is published. At this very moment I have made 662 posts through my Twitter account.
I was sceptical of the value of Twitter when first set up my account in the middle of 2007. In fact the only reason I even logged on then was to subscribe to the IrishElection.com feed for the 2007 General Election. I didn’t actually post on it until April 2008 and only did so three times before forgetting all about the thing.
Something convinced me to come back to the thing in late October 2008 and I have been posting on it since – an average of around 6 a day since then.Part of what made using the thing more logical was the third party apps like TweetDeck as keeping a webpage open to update it regularly was too awkward.
I now use Twitter regularly but I’m still not sold on some of the things it is supposed to offer people and businesses. It’s really just a fusion between facebook, forums and texting. The noise to signal ratio is far higher on Twitter (in my input at least) and while it is a great way of conversing with people to a certain extent I cannot see how a company can really use it to talk to its clients in a way that blogs and e-mails don’t allow.
I have well under 100 followers and am following under 50 people and at times I find it hard to keep track of what everyone is saying. I figure there must be a tipping point at which the number of people you subscribe to (or who subscribe to you) becomes too large to allow any real or meaningful dialogue and it can be very easy from there for the conversation to become one-way. In the end people with huge followings are just talking at their followers, not with.
I do think Twitter is a good thing, however. I wouldn’t be using it if I didn’t. There’s a lot of pointless stuff posted – I’m as guilty as anyone in typing out whatever’s on the top of my head at any given time – but the posts are so short you don’t feel robbed if you read one that you don’t care about. Besides that the amount of quality – assuming you’ve added the right people – makes the whole thing worthwhile for the most part.
In other words, I expect the gap between my Twitter and blog to grow further in the next few months but I’ll still consider my blog to be my primary presence online and my e-mail account my primary mode of communication.