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.

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Read more | Comments (0) | June 18, 2009, 1:04 pm

Twitter @replies Changes

Posted by Tyler | Filed under Rants

There’s been some hoopla on Twitter today after a poorly handled announcement that the option to control whether replies from people you follow to people you don’t follow show up in your feed. This was an option in the Notices section of the Twitter settings that was off by default. The original post from @biz made it sound like they were trying to reduce confusion and that it was no big deal. That’s a bit naive – they should have seen the backlash coming a mile away… Dave Winer has a good summary of problems with how they messaged things.

@biz later posted that they had heard the feedback, claiming it was a scalability problem with the implementation. I initially didn’t buy that argument, but the description over at ReadWriteWeb clarifies things somewhat. This comment over at Winer’s post clarifies it further. I think I understand now, given their architecture, why this would be a beneficial change for them to make.

But that’s not what I’m ultimately writing about. Much of the complaining from people opposed to the change has been that it makes it harder to meet new people on Twitter. If you see a reply to someone else from a person you follow then you might also be interested in following them. OK, fine, I buy that, but for me, I simply want to see everything people I follow say, regardless of who they say it to. With clients like Tweetie and Twitterrific 2.0 (iTunes link) able to browse through conversations effortlessly, I can use the tweets from my timeline as a jumping-off point to see the whole conversation which someone I am interested in is involved in. My goal is not to find new people to follow (though that does happen occasionally), but rather, just to see what interesting things people I follow are saying. I don’t care who they’re talking to. It’s not like everything @Lincolnator says to @MajorLB is completely uninteresting to me just because I don’t follow her.

The proposed changes as they stand right now don’t solve my complaint. But it’s early; the smart people at Twitter will figure something out, and hopefully, it’ll solve my scenario and world hunger at the same time. One can hope and dream.

You can see the protests/commentary onTwitter itself by searching for #fixreplies. It’s still the top trending search term as of this writing.

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Read more | Comments (0) | May 13, 2009, 2:14 pm