Things That Twitter is NOT
My presence in the Twitterverse has recently blossomed. Family and friends from all over are beginning to adopt it. As a result, it’s my new go-to for connection. 140 characters is all the communication I can handle. It’s ideal. But as people adopt Twitter in various facets, I have come up with a short list of guidelines about THINGS THAT TWITTER IS NOT.
Twitter is not RSS
A growing trend among mainstream blogs and users with blogs is to start serving links to your posted content via tweets. An automated plugin that posts to Twitter every time you post a blog post. This is not what Twitter is for. This is called “RSS”. It was all “the craze” 3 years ago.
Follow my logic. If I was into your website, I would have subscribed to your RSS feed already. I follow you on Twitter so that I can get insight into your life or company. I do not follow you to subscribe to content that I ultimately have to read in my web RSS-enabled browser anyways.
If you still feel that your content MUST be served over Twitter, how about you write a custom post that highlights your best recent content? How about de-automating it? Giving it a personal touch? This is actually a good idea. Your blog should be doing this.
Twitter is not Facebook
This is just a personal pet peeve I suppose. Not internet law. I know it’s hard to maintain 2 narcissistic things at once: a Twitter account & a Facebook status. And not all your friends have Twitter, so you gotta use the fall on Ocham’s razor and go with the thing that makes the most sense. So you set up a Facebook app to synchronize. Unfortunately the answer to Twitter’s question: “What are you doing?” is NOT
is upset about yesterday’s football game.
Ergo, Twitter is not Facebook, purely based on a grammatical basis. Are they totally different? No. Should Facebook buy Twitter? Yes. Should you stop automated apps? Yes.
As a last argument against this: For those of us who use handy apps like EventBox, you subject us to both your facebook status AND your duplicate Twitter status.
Twitter is not iChat
Sometimes @replies go on and on forcing innocent bystanders to sit through 2 people having what is ultimately a private chat. Etiquette suggests that this conversation can be moved privately simply by typing “d username some private message”, or it can be done via email.
Thankfully my friends have a lot of sensibility, but occasionally it leads to awkwardness.
Twitter is not a Polling Device
This is my final one. Especially around the election time, there were various Twitter polls going around for voting on the best candidate. 10 times out of 10 I can confidently say that Barack Obama won in a landslide 70%+ victory. I can sum in one sentence why Twitter is not a reliable polling device: My dad doesn’t use Twitter.
Only a small, elite (”leet”) subset of our great country uses Twitter and chances are they are younger, more liberal, more tech savvy, and adventurous than their elderly conservative counterparts.
The actual election was 52%-48%.
