Twitter Experiment

Posted by Tyler | Filed under Projects

I am experimenting a little with auto-tweeting from my blog to Twitter. In general, I dislike when people do this, for the following reasons:

  • I get double-exposure to their content. If I am interested enough in someone to follow them on Twitter, and they also have a blog, then 90% of the time I also subscribe to their RSS feed. That means I see their posts in Twitter then also in my feed. That bugs me.
  • Tweets are limited to 140 characters, and typically blog posts are longer. That means I see 100 characters plus a link, possibly less in the tweet itself. That’s useless.

At the same time, I find myself tweeting a lot of links, because Twitter is just a more vibrant community than my blog. I get a lot more comments and replies from people there than on my blog. Twitter is a decent place to broadcast stuff, but I don’t like the fact that I can’t easily find the stuff I’ve posted later. Have you tried using Twitter search to find a link you yourself posted in the past? It’s ridiculously bad. I figure if I can just keep it on my own site at least I have more control over the search experience. Another reason I want to do this is to have a centralized place to write stuff, then choose how it’s syndicated. This will let me do that.

In order to address the two issues I have with common auto-tweet solutions, I’ll only be tweeting some of my posts. I am doing this by feeding only posts tagged “tweet” to Twitter via TwitterFeed. In addition, I grabbed a WordPress plug-in that does character counts of posts in the WordPress web UI. This will help me keep my posts that are auto-tweeted short and completely digestible as a complete tweet.

Hopefully this will all come together and work. Let me know what you think.

Tagged : ,

Comments (0) | June 18th, 2009

Comments are closed.