I realize I’ve been very bad with posting regularly the past two weeks. It’s been nice outside and I’ve been otherwise engaged. But I have been keeping up with my Twitter updates pretty well. It sometimes just seems easier to post 140 characters than it does to come up with an entire well-written, original, full-length blog post (well, full-length to be sure; you can argue with the well-written and original parts).

I don’t see Twitter as a replacement for my blog; they each serve different functions. But I do see Twitter as providing a very important service that my blog doesn’t really provide, and that’s the sharing of links. There are tons of sites I come across every day that I want to share with people, but don’t want to write an entire blog post about. I generally bookmark these sites in del.icio.us, but I don’t think many people subscribe to my del.icio.us feed. I use del.icio.us more to file things away for my own future use. But Twitter is a great place to share links with others. And I’ve found that I learn about lots of new things from reading others’ feeds.

I know I’m not the first person to talk about Twitter in this way (there goes this post’s originality), but after talking to some non-Twittering friends yesterday, I think this is a very important use of Twitter. These friends, all of whom use MySpace or Facebook and Flickr, don’t really get Twitter. Which is fine; I didn’t get Twitter when I started using it. It’s hard to see its usefulness if people in your network don’t use it.

Anyway, I’m going to keep thinking and blogging about this issue (and posting more regularly), but in the meantime, please check my Twitter feed - http://twitter.com/jennmonroe.

Last Modified : March 29th, 2008 Filed under : research Navigate : Previous post / Next post