You spend hours writing a great blog post. When you finish editing and proofreading you finally publish it. The nice part: Your RSS subscribers are automatically notified the next time they open their aggregator. Since you’re running wordpress and you have the Twitter Tools plugin installed a tweet is automatically sent out and your followers are notified. Your Facebook profile isn’t far off since you either have the Twitter or Selective Twitter Status applications installed. You’ve also got friendfeed, tumblr, and ping.fm or last.fm (or both) and they all are connected to your twitter account those sites are updated as well.
Do you need to be a member at each of the above named sites? No, that’s your decision. I’ve tried all of them, but they each serve a specific purpose that doesn’t necessarily appeal to me. However, if you do happen to have all of the sites, why not hook them all up? The question is, for the ones you do have, how are you using them?
Anymore for me; Facebook ends up being a great place for my friends to find me, for communications to happen, and for big events to be planned out and available to me quickly. My 10 year high school reunion is being planned on Facebook. I think I have pretty much every classmate added as a friend. Keep in mind that I only had ~40 people in my class so it’s not a huge number, but we’re all on the site, why not do it there. Sure beats spending possible snack/beer money on stamps and phonecalls.
This is also a place that allows for archiving of who a person is in one convenient location. From videos, links, and comments that people make to what friends they have and what photos they have available. I should mention the countless applications that are available to members. I’ve recently stopped my practice of blocking all apps that I don’t like. I realized that the apps that people install and allow to post stories to their feeds are part of who they are. I don’t like most, so I don’t install them, that’s my choice. I have been seeing more of a trend of applications not sending me notifications about an invitation to fill out.
The fact that this service allows you to comment on everything that any one of your friends post is what makes it popular. Conversations thrive across groups of people that may have no other tie-in except for the original poster and the topic posted about.
[smartads]
Your thoughts in 140 characters or less. How much better to get into the head of people you are following than to see their quick thoughts about random activities throughout the day. Some users get it, some users don’t. The function of this service hangs on the interactivity of it’s userbase. It thrives off people following other people and conversations starting. But along with the ability to spill out everything that you’re thinking or think is cool, the unwritten rule is two-way communication. If you’re going to be spouting off information and wanting people to read it and wonder about it, you better be damned sure that you’re interested in what they have to say, otherwise, why in the world are you following them. (that previous statement was edited to remove the swears).
I’ve been paying closer attention lately to not only my habits communicating, but also to the people I follow. Am I really interested in what they have to say? If not, I don’t follow them. If that means that I get some auto-followers stop following me, whatever. The whole “What are you doing?” is the key factor, if I’m not helping them get their follower stats higher, I really don’t care. If you’re not interesting to me, I won’t follow you.
One quick other thing for me regarding twitter: Be real, inquisitive, engaging… oh wait… be a human through your tweets. You don’t go to lunch and just talk and expect the people you go to lunch with to just listen… or wait, if you do, I’m really sorry, that sucks, you should work on that.
–dez