Noise: Twitter, Pownce and FriendFeed

[I was about to pownce this quick note but I feel my blog needs me]
I turned off rePownce for facebook today because of complaints about cross-posting.

I agree with the argument that cross-posting is “lame” because with abundance of socialstream services it’s not necessary anymore.

I’m still reluctant however to give up on twitterfeed because I know there are people that follow me on that network only. And even though I don’t contribute directly to twitter, especially the few followers, I still feel the need to update them with my micro-posts.

Someday I’ll turn it off, probably the day I see the need to use twitter.

But the point is if you subscribe to my current lifestream at feedfriend, http://friendfeed.com/dancameron, you won’t have to worry about trying to keep up with my obsession to change services.

It’s got every feed that’s on my “social graph” and if I plan to stop using a service or start using another you wont have to worry about tracking down RSS feeds or pruning out old ones.

Blog

April 07

Comments

About the Author, Dan Cameron:

I'm the owner and solution engineer at Sprout Venture, a web solutions company that specializes in web development including WordPress.

I started my first blog in 2003 and transitioned to WordPress in 2004. Since moving to WordPress I've written a few plugins and themes for public consumption. Lately I'm busy engineering/building/coding and have only been able to share a few code snippets.

If you're in need of some web development, web design or custom WordPress plugins and/or themes contact me, I'll be happy to discuss it with you.

Read More »

  • Yeah, I just mean the one that you include in your profile; shows up as "Web" on your Twitter page.
  • my twitter url?
  • PS - Are you going to point your Twitter URL to FriendFeed, or leave it pointed here?
  • Congrats on getting back to blogging more, BTW. As you know, I do prefer blogs (over Pownce) for these types of discussions.
  • Originally Pownce was to replace Twitter for my micro-blogging and since both serve two different mediums and crowds twitterfeed is the only way to get my twitter status updated without posting in two places.

    I just hate having more then one source for my micro-posts/status updates. It's just annoying that I have to decide what medium to use instead of using Pownce for everything.

    So, I'll probably just stop using twitter altogether. Since, I still prefer Pownce over twitter and it has nothing to offer me.
  • Yeah, I think having a consolidated place for everything (like FriendFeed) is the correct approach to addressing the issue of allowing people to easily follow everything you're doing.

    As opposed to cross-posting, which is always, always bad. :-)

    Even for twitter - I commented a while ago about starting an anti-twitterfeed campaign, and I was only half joking; half joking because I do feel like one needs to be started, but I'm not going to do it.

    Twitter already provides a place where you can specify an external URL, so that you can easily direct people to your presence outside of Twitter (whether it be to your blog or to FriendFeed, etc.).

    I'd even go farther and venture to guess that every single person who's interested in following you in Twitter is also well aware of how to discover your other content sources and subscribe to them via RSS.

    It always bugs me when I see Twitter posts with blog excerpts and then a link to the blog post. If I want to subscribe to your blog, I (and everyone else and their grandmothers, at least if they're using Twitter) can already do that.

    If someone posts something really cool on their blog (or wherever) that they just can't resist sharing about on Twitter, then they could at least make the message Twitter appropriate, by which I mean a standard "tweet" that fits in (and forms a complete thought in) the space alloted followed by a link, instead of a hardcoded excerpt of the first few words of the post which almost never makes sense out of context, which is what you usually get from twitterfeed. I've stopped following some people on Twitter for that reason - those things are just to jumbled and messy looking.

    Mike Arrington's use of Twitter when linking to TechCrunch is an example of what I'm talking about in terms of how I think the etiquette of linking to blog posts from Twitter should work:
    #1 - It's not automatic, not for every post.
    #2 - It's not a meaningless excerpt, it's a brief, Twitter-targeted message, followed by the link

    Of course this is all my humble personal opinion, and judging by the popularity of Twitterfeed, there are plenty of people who obviously disagree with me, but that's my two cents...
blog comments powered by Disqus