Chris Brogan tweeted this yesterday:
Dear @stoweboyd : I miss you writing a blog instead of 2 or 3 sentences. Come back soon. about 23 hours ago from Seesmic
Twitter / Chris Brogan: Dear @stoweboyd : I miss y …
The link above is to the Twitter entry…..I re-tweeted a few minutes ago that this highlights the problem of Twitter and “conversationâ€. Twitter is, or seems to me to be a NOTIFICATION of conversation, aside from its role as a pointer to worthy items of note. So many tweets are disconnected from their natural flow (the context) that would enable other readers to enjoy the humor, or see the significance in the larger conversation from which it sprung. The Twitter clients are maturing, but the path back to the original flow is not always an easy find.
Chris is encouraging his friend to not let Twitter drown out his capacity to more fully express himself. This is precisely why I was not enamored with Twitter early on. I saw this abandonment of better conversations and self-expression by really good writer/bloggers who I now dearly miss. I have experienced the “joy†of Twitter to be sure, but I still begrudge it for the same reason that Chris seems to do here. That is why, early on, I installed Twitter tools in my WordPress installation. I hope to see the integration continue to deepen (like with comments for instance; a way to get blog comments to become tweets that point back to the post from which they sprung. And vice-versa: That comments given via Twitter as retweets or replies be pulled into the blog comment thread. And I all for the expansion of the idea of twitter metadata that allows twitter clients to easily recover the larger context of the lone tweet that is disconnected from its original inspiration for the twitter user who happens upon it.
Jeremy,
But the problem here is not the process, or the technology (that is a different problem that I have confidence will be ironed out as blogs better integrate open logins). My point was the limitation of characters keeps the twitter channel limited to short bursts; many times I don’t even know what the heck they’re talking about becuase of the lack of a trail back to the origination of the thought. Chris Brogan’s tweet was almost ironic, since it ssaid something about how tweets took away something of what he has appreciated about the blogger in question. He happened to have been able to use that quick thought to express his frustration with that problem. That’s why I did not get into Twitter much at all until I was able to begin utilizing Blog-to-Twitter tools. And the Tech tweeters like Winer, Scoble, etc. are a good example of how Twitter is taking over the notification game from RSS (with a few exceptions)
I am in agreement with you on the comments functionality on blogs, though. I was hoping 2.9 WordPress would address this, but I can’t get it installed. Some kind of data (mySQL) problem with my host. I’m still on 2.8
I disagree. Blogs take too long to cycle: you have to log in, post a comment, sometimes have it moderated, sometimes manually check back in to see if anyone replied (even the blog-author, sometimes!). Twitter puts all this in one place.