Return on Intention

Twitter is a very powerful, and as of late, popular tool for the online crowd. Twitter is really nothing more that a one-to-many message service that restricts posts to 140 characters, and has been called everything from the new billboard to micro-blogging.  Twitter is used a little differently by everyone; some use it as it was originally indented, to say what you are you doing now, while others use it to post their witty comments and still others to spread links. According to Joseph Jaffe, Twitter is a giant Ponzi Scheme (there’s a Twucker born every minute). If you ask me though, it’s the single greatest thing to happen to the blogosphere so far.

Blogging has been growing at a very steep upward rate for a few years now and there are millions of bloggers out on the web creating content. Some of it doesn’t interest me at all, like photos and a daily account of the family cat (unless its a lol cat), but there are many others out there creating content that is exactly what I am interested in. The problem is that there are so many blogs, it can be hard to find all the good stuff. Additionally, I don’t want to clog up my rss reader with a bunch of blogs that only have good content for me every blue moon while the rest of the time I have to read enough of the authors post in the stream just to find out I don’t care and move on. I prefer podcasting and audio formats over text formats, its easier for me to listen than to read to absorb content, so I want my rss reader only full of the stuff I really want. I still read a lot of posts from a lot of places, but I don’t subscribe to the feed until I see repeated good stories (for me).

Twitter isn’t much different. You find people who post about all sorts of things, some I’m interested in and some I’m not. I am much more likely to follow a person on twitter that I am to subscribe to their blog feed because on twitter each message can only be 140 characters. Its much faster for me to digest the information and decide if this person is adding value. It seems like less of a commitment, I suppose.

What I really like about twitter is that most of the posts I like, and therefor most of the people follow, tend to share what they find online that they find interesting. Most often its a blog post. Twitter is allowing me to find longer form content online that I normally wouldn’t, and becuase I follow people on Tiwtter that are interested in the same things I am, most of the time the posts they provide are interesting to me. It’s almost like the interent is prequalifing content just for me.

I also enjoy the witty remarks that people post to twitter, or quotes that my twitter “friends” have heard from other people, both funny and silly, but over all, twitter is a community based content finder and filter, and the best thing to happen to the blogsophere so far.

What do you use twitter for?

By the way, if your interested, you can follow me here: @reidgivens

Tags: blogging, blogosphere, link sharing, tweetie, twitter

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 7:44 am and is filed under The Wild Wild Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.