I was intrigued with the recent article The Twitterization of Blogs in Business Week recently.
As a fan and regular user of Twitter I was obviously captured by the heading. Although the article talks very little about Twitter, it did make some interesting observations about the low numbers of readers that the majority of bloggers target themselves at and their reasons for blogging: “Hsu guesses that only five people tune in regularly, while occasional readers may number 25. But she’s far from disappointed about not having the mass following of the blog TechCrunch. “I don’t hope that I meet new people. In fact, a lot of times, if I have a random person comment, I get scared,” says Hsu. “All I really want is for my friends to see it.”
Hsu’s not alone in blogging for her buds. On average, there are only seven readers for each of the 12.5 million blogs on LiveJournal, one of the most popular services for hosting these online journals.”
The article also covers some of the directions that blogging is going, but what really got me thinking was the ways in which people are using Twitter, and the different approaches people are taking.
For example, my wife uses Twitter purely to communicate with me. Sad as it may seem we often spend a lot of time in our respective work rooms, and while I often have MSN, iChat and Skype open, if I am working on something that I need to concentrate on I will log out of them. I very rarely shut down Twitterrific though, because I do not feel compelled to read or respond to Twitter updates. With IM it is a direct, one to one, contact requiring either a response or a visible rejection. Twitter is just another window to the world that I look through from time to time. So, Sands will Twitter me about stuff during the day.
On Almerimar Life I use Twitter as a sort of news banner. I update it very infrequently, usually with general information – the weather, details about the site sponsors, events that day etc.
On this site I have the banner at the top, but as I use this twitter account more the information changes pretty much every hour. I use Twitter Tools so that any new post is automatically twittered. I have found Twitter a really good way of promoting the blog and communicating with a number of readers, and I find I use it a lot to arrange things, in particular a IM or Skype session.
I have noticed that a lot of the early adopters have dropped off, and (thankfully) the number of “Good Morning” “Having a Coffee” Tweets is diminishing. I have received help solving problems via Twitter, I have picked up great information and suggestion for products and reviews off Twitter. To me it seems to be finding a nice and useful niche in my work flow.
So, how do you use Twitter?
Just skimmed through that article and it seemed fairly interesting. I don’t really keep up my blog for any other reason than I enjoy writing when I have the time and whoever wants to read it can read it – though it was originally aimed at my mother so she could see what I was up to, that trailed off quickly when I realised I hated saying “just got back from a lecture.. it was fine”.
I do use Twitter for the latter, though. If I’m in a lecture, I’ll say so. My (half)sister and my mum follow it so that they can see what I’m doing and anyone else who is interested can do the same.
Like you, I don’t mind having Twitterrific open but I don’t always like having MSN/AIM and Skype open as I feel like I have to respond right there, right then and I don’t always have time. People can get hold of me on Twitter, should they choose to!
I will now, thank you, install Twitter Tools! I could use the auto-tweet option on new blog posts. 🙂
I think I have just seen that you have installed Twitter Tools 🙂