Everyone is trying to be like the shiny new toy, Twitter.
My Internet service provider, Bell Mail, has launched their new “enhanced” mail service, and it wants me to invite people to join my network and update them on what I’m doing. LinkedIn and Facebook want me to invite people to join my network and update them on what I’m doing. The Air Miles loyalty program just announced a new “community” and invited me to pick my user name and join in, sharing travel and Air Miles reward stories. No doubt, they also want me to invite people to join my network and update them on what I’m doing.
But Twitter is the place everyone seems to want to be.
The thing I’ve noticed lately is that people who are busy Twittering are slowly neglecting other parts of their online life. They aren’t updating their blogs as often, or they’re letting a Twitter feed take the place of posts. Twitter comments (yes, I know they are called tweets) are replacing Facebook status updates.
An article by Michael Learmonth in Advertising Age asks, “Why did Facebook suddenly get so much more Twitter-like?” He notes that Facebook “started emulating key functions of Twitter earlier in March after a redesign made status updates central and immediate,” but that “The tweet is replacing the status update among the digerati.”
Not everyone thinks this is good. I ran across Carpe Media and Emily Sussman’s musings on the back-and-forth Facebook encourages by letting people comment on friends’ status updates. She says:
“Unlike Facebook, micro-blogging on Twitter strikes me as the equivalent of shouting into a vacuum…Essentially, Twitter posts are graffiti while Facebook’s status updates function as a dynamic community bulletin board — the latter succeeds because of its context’s fully interactive interface.”
Twitterer kevinrose asks, “is personal blogging dead? w/my facebook page/twitter, I’m not sure I need a blog anymore.”
Do you agree?