Social media butterflies
The latest thing to catch the attention of the online audience, in case you haven't already heard, is Twitter. It's hard to describe Twitter except to say that it's basically a chat room for people to tell their friends and contacts what they're doing at the moment. Very cool, right? It is.
Unfortunately some people have mistaken Twitter for the end-all-be-all of social media instead of just another tool, and a limited one at that. People have begun declaring that their Twitter feeds are more interesting than their blogs, or that they're going to switch full-time to Twittering instead of blogging. In my estimation this is a signal of not being all that interested in an actual conversation and being more interested in acting as a news bureau.
See Twitter has several characteristics that limit its usefulness as a social media conduit. First of all, each entry only allows for 140 characters. Not exactly space that lends itself to analysis of any sort. Second, it converts long URLs you might want to pass on to TinyURLs to accommodate that character limit. That means while people might be passing on your links, you won't be able to see how they're being tracked through Technorati or anything. So if you're a blogger tracking your URL or a company looking to see how the conversation about them is progressing.
Anyone who's looking to replace their blogs with their Twitter feeds seems to me like they're easily distracted by shiny objects and I neither want to be blogging nor driving next to people like that. Twitter is a cool thing and I'm having a kick engaging in the conversation with the people there. But I'd have to post something like 78 updates there in order to convey what I have in this single post doing it two sentences at a time. It's just a tool, just like blogging is just a tool. It's the thoughts, opinions and knowledge of the people using those tools that have made them powerful - not the tools themselves. Newspapers could use blogging software but the content still comes from newspapers. It's when people outside the mainstream use blogging software that the power is embraced.
Twitter should be a conversation tool, one among many. Don't confuse shiny and slick for all-powerful.
