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On Twitter Replacing RSS/Blogging
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Simon Willison asks whether people are using Twitter as a replacement for RSS aggregators, and finds anecdotally that a sizable number are.
I can buy that. I still prefer RSS for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the velocity of Twitter is too high – I don’t have time to keep up with a lot of the conversations, and by the time I get around to reading (if I do), it’s often too late to participate. It’s also annoying to see partial nonsensical conversations between people you’re otherwise interested in. A lot of the old timers are using Twitter as the new IRC, and I’m not quite used to that yet.
Anyway, as a still-interested-in-RSS fellow I’m concerned not about people using Twitter as an RSS aggregator replacement, but about authors tweeting instead of blogging. I enjoy reading longer, more thoughtful pieces, and I feel like people are decreasing their blogging output in favor of increased tweeting. Looking at my RSS feeds it feels like a good number of the non-commercial authors are publishing less than they used to. I suppose if I wasn’t lazy I could actually calculate this instead of guessing, but, alas, I’m lazy.
So, Simon, perhaps you could ask the complement of the authors as well: are they using Twitter in place of writing blog posts?
I was just thinking about blogging-vs-twittering this morning, actually. I’ve noticed that I use Twitter and its ilk much more often than I blog, to the point that people just following a Global Spin feed would be “missing out.”
Then I caught myself. For me, this is *nothing new*. I’ve had people bugging me to update GS for over a decade now, and I’ve never kept up. Blog software helped me go from “updating the site” monthly to more-like-weekly. Services like Facebook (for more personal updates), Twitter (for off-hand commentary), and Google Reader (for sharing news items) actually let me update my “online cloud persona” more-like-daily.
Has my blogging suffered as a result? Maybe. I can see that many of the “here, check this out” posts have shifted from the blog to sharing systems. However, the number of substantive posts–which was always small–probably hasn’t changed much. So until there’s AI to take all my crazy tweets and diggs and likes and comments and merge them into something coherent and readable, I imagine I’ll never have enough time to be as verbose as I’d like.
I agree, each tool lends itself to a different form/size of communication. But I do feel sometimes you have a nugget of thought circling around in your head, and you let it loose on Twitter, and you can stop thinking about it. That same nugget of thought, forced to stick around in your head until you have an opportunity to blog, could’ve turned into a nicer, more substantive post.
I’m not too concerned with my own posting habits – I’m not that interested in what I have to say – but I’m noticing some of the technologists I enjoy following are not posting as much, or are having twitter conversations, which I absolutely hate to follow.
I really have to just sit down and write the scripts to pick out selected technologists (not professional blogs that make their living posting), plot their post size and frequency over time, and plot when they started seriously using Twitter to see if there’s any correlation.