Ever battling my technotarded nature, I yesterday signed Hesperus Press up for Twitter; unfortunately, however, signing up seems to have been the easy part. Eventually beating TwitterFeed into submission, I think I’ve now managed to link to this here blog. I’m still a little lost, however, and if it’s not too much to ask on a Wednesday morning, would appreciate some help of a rather philosophical bent: what the bleedin’ ‘ell does it all mean?
I mean, it all seems very exciting, and let’s face it, if Mark Thwaite’s on the bandwagon then it’s probably a good idea to jump on board. The problem is, though, that I just can’t see how it differs from a blog, other than in the length of the posts, and that disparity seems all but meaningless when you take into account the fact that most people seem just to be using their miniscule 140-character submissions to link to their longer blog posts. Case in point, it seems utterly bizarre to me that this post, written about Twitter on a blog, will ultimately show up on Twitter (if I’ve configured TwitterFeeds correctly, which I’ll grant you is no dead cert). Surely all of the people using Twitter also have blogs, and will already receive updates about my blog through their bloglines or similar? I realise that to those in the know, that’s probably the equivalent of asking why we need mobile phones when carrier pigeons were perfectly adequate, but humour me.
I guess the crux of my question is as follows: does Twitter differ from a blog in terms of content, the amount of people to whom that content spreads, or the speed of that dissemination? Or a combination of all three? Or, alternatively, should I stop drawing comparisons at all and see them as conceptually completely different things?
Answers on a postcard, please. Or maybe a telegram.
ER
Hiya Ellie,
Twitter is a bit baffling, that’s for sure. But, in the words of Twitter themselves: “Twitter is more fun when used through your mobile phone or instant messenger client.”
Its use, as I see it — apart from the social networking side and apart from the bigger fact that if some of [y]our readers want to receive [y]our words in X format then we should jolly well try to make sure that they can receive them in just exactly the format that they want — is to convert your blog entries into text messages.
You can use Twitter to natter to your mates and it is just as good as many other sites for that. But I don’t know of another site that will convert your blog to a text and send it to whoever has signed up to get it from you …
And if the BBC are playing with it …
markx
Mark to the rescue! Thanks, Mark. I guess my problem with getting my head around it is simply that I just can’t imagine receiving a blog on a mobile phone. Perhaps this is because my phone is so monumentally rubbish. Does the whole blog appear on the phone, or merely a notification that it’s been posted? The latter would be infinitely less useful, but I just can’t imagine the former being feasible, given the length of some blogs (notably ours!).
Do we have any avid mobile bloggers here?
I’m kinda with you Ellie! Blog posts that say, “Hey, X is really good” might be useful as a text. But me banging on at length about Blanchot (as I’m wont to do over at ReadySteadyBook.com on occassion) doesn’t seem to fit very well at all. Ho hum. I’m sure as we all play with Twitter a bit more we’ll find our own level with it.
Twitter has many uses, but probably with your Hesperus Press Twitter account you’re not all that interested in personal social networking. Think of Twitter, then, as another means of getting word out to readers and potential readers of your blog. (I, for one, was unaware of your blog before discovering you on Twitter yesterday.) Some readers might like to get announcements about your posts via Twitter rather than RSS. And if I can inject some of my own experiences, my site TwitterLit.com was designed to work with Twitter. But if I’d created the same site pre-Twitter, there’s no way word about it would have spread as quickly as it has. (I’ve also used Twitter to spread the word about my other book sites. Far more people have subscribed to them now via Twitter than have by RSS.) Twitter offers an unusual opportunity for publicizing information. (But no, I don’t think the idea of Twitterizing whole blog posts is a good one. Twitter has limitations, of course, but also a great deal of possibility. Besides, we have RSS to perform that function.)
Dear Debra,
This is now my third attempt to reply to your comment, my previous two having been mysteriously wiped. I hope that this circumstance will demonstrate that my gripe is not with Twitter at all, but with my own inabilities!
I think I’m beginning to get my head around the whole thing – it helped when I realised that I’d plugged the blog URL rather than the feed into TwitterFeed – and can see that it could be a very useful resource. I think the next thing to do will be to send out some posts specifically on Twitter, rather than relying on the relay of the blog posts.
Thanks so much for your encouragement; it’s invaluable to hear from an expert Twitterer. Congratulations on Twitterlit, too – I’m a big fan.
Ellie, hoping against hope that this comment doesn’t disappear into the ether.
Glad you like TwitterLit!
TwitterFeed is very handy (its creator Twitters @mario), and actually quite easy to use. And even better now that you can tell it to only post blog headlines rather than including characters from the post as well. (Initially that wasn’t the case. I’d actually created new RSS feeds to be used specifically for TwitterFeed, but I didn’t need them once that feature was added.)
The neat thing about Twitter–*a* neat thing–is that it can be used in lots of different ways. So just using it as an alternative announcement for one’s blog is fine, or you can supplement that with Twitter-only comments, or you can use it to have conversations with friends, or to report on an event or television show, or to (presumably its originally intended use) simply announce what you’re doing right now. You could embed your Twitter output from one or more accounts as microblogs on your blog, for example, to track, I don’t know…books read, or movies watched. So many possibilities. One account was Twittering the availability of washers and dryers in some college laundry room.
It’s interesting to watch what people come up with.