As you may have noticed, I haven’t blogged much recently. In fact, the only blog posts in the past 2 weeks were my twitter aggregations.
Earlier today, a friend tells me he doesn’t fully understand why people use twitter and he really doesn’t understand why people post tweets on their blog.
First and foremost, I’d like to point out there are many different reasons why people use Twitter. Initially, I thought it was rather stupid too. Who in the right mind would want to tweet about what they’re doing all the time? See Penny Arcade!’s Le Twittre. And who in their right mind would care about knowing every mundane detail of what’s going on in your life? Unless of course you’re a stalker, but then you wouldn’t be in your right mind anyway. However, I found a very different use for Twitter. I’ve only been using it for about 2 months, and I’ve been slowly adapting on how I would like to use it.
My current twitter usage pattern is something similar to my Random Crap posts, in what I like to call mini-blog posts. I hear about something I want to share or I see a link I want to share. I used to aggregate this into 1 giant random crap post and then post it. Otherwise, I would create a draft in hopes one day when I have time, I would expand on it. Looking at my drafts count of 46, I don’t think it’s likely most of them will ever be published.
Initially, I kept my blog and Twitter separate, however I soon realized that people who come to read my blog are people who want to see what I’m up to or what I find interesting, basically the same stuff I’ve been posting on Twitter, but in short bursts of 140 characters or less. Therefore, my new weekly Twitter digest posts are akin to my Random Crap posts, containing links and whatever else I wanted to share during the week.
I understand that my twitter also includes response/replies that readers may not care about. Then again, probably half the stuff I ever post here you wouldn’t care about, so I don’t think that would make much a difference. It’s also not uncommon for me or others to respond to someone specifically in a blog post. In fact, this blog post by itself can be considered a response to the statement posed to me earlier today. Besides, most of the response/replies included are stuff I do want to share, or else I would’ve used the Direct Message feature in Twitter.
Of course, there’s also nothing stopping you from skipping/ignoring my twitter posts if you don’t fancy them.