As with a lot of visceral reactions and their resulting rants,  I have to clarify a few things I said in my previous post.  I am not quitting Twitter or other Social Media apps where I have accounts.  But I do totally agree with the sentiment that blogs still should be ,  for those who do blog,  the “hub” of our Social Media.  We need more attention paid to that sentiment by the makers of plugins and other Social Media “hook up” tools.  I’d like to be able to manage Twitter responses to blog posts that I automatically tweet,  and manage  these in my blog admin tools.  I have run across a couple of comments tools that claim to identify twitter replies to tweets (that have been tweeted by the twitter plugin connected to my blog) ,  and pull those into the comment section of that blog post.  The last one of those I found did not work.  I remain hopeful.

So  many good bloggers I know have basically abandoned their blogs for Twitter.  That is what I consider a loss to the blogosphere.  They seem to have effectively turned themselves inward toward their peer group,  since so many of their tweets are so non-specific to their wider audience as to be  rendered meaningless.  I often have no idea what they’re referring to,  usually reacting with an inner “whatever”.

My attraction to Twitter originated when I discovered its use as a recommendation engine ,  much like what RSS has been,  but  with the added filter of focusing on particular “finds” from those I have chosen to follow.  So ,  instead of sifting through all the article titles in multiple chosen feeds.  For some time now,  I have lost touch with the blogs  of those who do not have twitter accounts because of this.  So,  every once ina while, I look at Google Reader.  So there’s a disadvantage there.  But the people I follow on Twitter will point to specific articles and links that would often be missed if they weren’t included in the  articles I found through RSS feeds,  or if I skipped over an article from an RSS feed if I wasn’t attracted  by the title of the article in the feed.

I’d like to find some way of helping me comb through all my old RSS feed sources and discover their twitter accounts.  But even then I would be limited to what the sources had chosen to tweet. If they don’t have an auto tweeter of all their articles,  then  I would not have that via their twitter account.

It seems as though Social Media has already reached such a critical mass that  we need to be talking about aggregating tools.  Twitter clients have tried to provide this by providing for login and display of streams for multiple services,  but there is rarely any true aggregation there outside the display of discrete columns or straight combining of the feeds (resulting in multiple listings for items that the users themselves tweet and post as updates to multiple services).

The WordPress development community has done a pretty good job of continuing to pump out the enhancement tools/plugins that provide some of this aggregation of Social Media.  But it’s beginning to get cluttered in that  space.   All of this Social Media service stuff running in sidebars has impacted my blog’s load time (especially on the really sucky service and uptime my host has been providing)

More on this coming…..