I was looking at my Twitter account and all the current postings and a few things struck me. First was that I had not Twittered in some time but it felt like I had. Second, there were an awful lot of posts that were from newspapers that I follow. Third, that I like microblogging functionality and wondered if cross posting microblogs entries made sense.
FIRST:
The reason it felt like I had Twittered when I hadn't was due to the recent rash of activity on Facebook. The first thing you encounter on the Facebook home page for your account is the text box begging for entry. "Andrew is ..."
Sometimes I enter what I happen to be doing. Which is quite similar to a Twitter post, though Twitter does not surround itself with other distractions like sheep throwing and game playing. So why Twitter?
SECOND:
There is a reason for multiple news postings. I follow a few newspapers. In fact, I like that the news folks are twittering and sometimes, like in the flooding recently, it is very interesting to follow along with the twitter storm.
Alicia L. sent me a very interesting article a couple of weeks ago (thank you) from Publishing 2.0 with the title "A Revolution Quietly Begins in Washington State". It speaks of how a number of reporters from different publications in Washington and the South Sound came together over the web and pooled their twitters via a "waflood" tag, creating a cooperative reporting platform that focused on information and not brand. Pretty cool stuff.
CNN picked it up a week later in their piece "Social Networking Sites Share..."
Mark Briggs likes Twitter enough that today on Journalism 2.0 he makes a case for paying for it.
I can see a journalistic trend here, and maybe that is the direction that Twitter is taking. They may have to allow for multiple categories for following different post trails.
THIRD:
Twitter does not have as much value to me if I don't post. Facebook is taking some of my posts away from Twitter. I don't know how long it has been since I used Quillpill, which I love. And now that Jott is charging, I am not as likely to use it, as it never became ingrained into my routine.
So how about an application that allows you to post to multiple microblogging sites at once? Well, during the writing of this post it occurred to me to try and answer my own question, and voila! I found it. I even posted on it once. SixApart has a typepad based product that is available through Facebook that allows for posting your status on Twitter, Facebook and others at once. It is called Blog It.
They don't have QuillPill there, but perhaps it is coming.
6 comments:
For Macintosh users, MoodBlast allows one to cross-post your status to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and a handful of other social networking sites.
I need to check out Blogit. Most of the time I don't really care about my Facebook status. To me, Facebook is more for sharing links and videos and groups and networking with people that I already know. Twitter is more like going to a giant cocktail party, or if you get really addicted to the "breaking news" aspect, providing the entertainment for the party. Facebook is for hanging out with your friends.
I'm not sure it really does anything for me, but I'm addicted.
I cross-post using Ping (http://ping.fm/). It posts to myspace, twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Yahoo360 and a whole lot of others too.
Thanks Angela, I am going to check Ping out.
"Twitter does not surround itself with other distractions like sheep throwing and game playing. So why Twitter?"
For exactly this reason. Comprehensive apps like Facebook certainly have their place, but I've found that I prefer Twitter largely because of its simplicity. No need to navigate down in order to see only peoples' status updates. No clutter of other information.
I'm to the point where I pretty rarely use the facebook status line, unless it's information that I specifically think would be of interest to people who don't follow my Twitter.
Honestly, it is sad that you all had experience with so many sites that at least two of you are happy that there is an ability to just post on one site and have the message broadcast across all. Why is there a need in yourselves to share the intimate details of your life everywhere? You can't say that there is a difference between the communities of the sites if you are broadcasting the same message. Sorry--gotta go write a letter.
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