Anyway

Tim recently pos­ted about Twit­ter, and it got me think­ing I should blog some of my own thoughts on the sub­ject of Twit­ter (and related ser­vices such as Jaiku). Tim’s not the only per­son to move from tweet­ing a bal­anced mix that includes appar­ently super­fi­cial trivia to mainly, or even only, tweet­ing work or busi­ness-related stuff. From my point of view, that’s regret­table. I fol­low only a few people, mostly people I know in per­son, because I want to know what they’re up to and main­tain some sort of con­tact with them as people, not because I see them as sources of busi­ness inform­a­tion. I’ve watched people’s blogs go from per­son­al-with-some-work to mostly-work, now I’m watch­ing people’s twit­ter feeds go through the same trans­form­a­tion, and for me there’s a feel­ing of loss, a feel­ing that I’m just watch­ing more masks (think­ing back to Julie Leun­g’s talk at North­ern Voice) being put in place. 

I guess it’s inev­it­able than any new mode of broad­cast com­mu­nic­a­tion be coopted in this way. I’ve had the same feel­ing at North­ern­Voice of being a King Canute in seek­ing to emphas­ize the per­son­al com­mu­nic­a­tions aspect of blog­ging and social media; the addi­tion­al prob­lem there of course is that people happy to blog at a per­son­al level appar­ently see no need to attend a blog­ging conference.

Many people whose recom­mend­a­tions I would value don’t blog much any more. They put the links to art­icles they’ve read, or books they liked, in their Twit­ter feeds. If I’m not read­ing Twit­ter at that time, I miss those links. No, I don’t like blogs that are solely link feeds, there does have to be a bal­ance, but if something’s worth recom­mend­ing, why not recom­mend it some­where it might live longer than a couple of hours? And some­where I have a hope of find­ing again if I have a men­tal book­mark that you wrote about some­thing inter­est­ing while I was busy doing some­thing else?