Twitter has definitely changed a lot of things for lots of bloggers. To compound matters, Twitter changes things with Facebook too. I’ve been thinking about the best way to handle all three of these things for a while. There are few issues that come up which make it almost impossible to not annoy someone. Usually I wouldn’t care about that, but how to deal with these things has been bothering me as well:
- I like Twitter updates fed into Facebook, but I’m finding that most people on Facebook don’t realize that I’m not actually on Facebook when they show up. So I end up getting replies on my status, an email about those replies (yes, I know I can suppress those), along with the replies I’m actually expecting on Twitter itself. Worlds collide! I don’t want to disable the emails because I still want to be notified when people are replying to my actual status updates.
- I like Twitter to be updated when I write a new post here. I realize that’s annoying for a lot of people as a general concept, but my tweet/post ratio is probably close to 30/1, so it can’t be that annoying. And the stuff I write here matches up pretty well with the stuff I tweet.
- I like hitting the “Post to Twitter” button to tweet what I find interesting in my browser, but that seems like it may be annoying for my regular Twitter followers, and it may not match up with what I tweet.
- I’d like to be able to make short blog posts out of these tweets from the browser, Instapundit style, but that format doesn’t really fit in here either. Most of what shows up here is what I’m thinking, usually a little longer than 140 characters, and is coming from me instead of just a one line comment on someone else’s post.
- Online reputation management is becoming a bigger deal. Since I own www.scottadcox.com, I figured I should go ahead and use it.
Here’s what I’ve come up with…
- Removed my ‘sadcox’ Twitter feed from my Facebook status updates. I figure I can still use Facebook’s built in status update, possibly for more personal type stuff. So…don’t expect too many updates there…heh. That move is more for me than for other people.
- Set up a new ‘scottadcox’ Twitter account, mainly to handle tweets coming off the browser. So there shouldn’t be any more “Reading:” tweets on my sadcox account unless I make a mistake. I’ll be using the ‘sadcox’ account more for conversation, replies, etc. I still consider that my “real” Twitter account. No need to follow the new one unless you just want to see what I’m reading. In other words, no interaction on that account.
- Set up a new blog, www.scottadcox.com. This will mostly be made up of the tweets from the browser, which will let me post Insty-style. I even found a theme that works well for that type of posting. It will be very frequent with limited commentary, like Twitter for people who don’t use Twitter.
I don’t really have any plans for monetizing the new blog–it’s mostly just for linking out. There may be some VERY unobtrusive ads later, but that’s not really on the table at this point. The basic idea is to make something easy to read and pop lots of interesting stuff. I’ve felt pretty limited here in not being able to do that just because of the layout, and I’m not really interested in completely shifting gears here and changing what I’ve been doing.
Maybe I’ll change my mind later…dunno. For now I’m going to put the feed from the new blog in the sidebar here. Hopefully these two will end up working together somehow, and I’ll figure out exactly how that will happen according to the bumps in the road I’m sure to encounter.
I’ve run into a situation where I am monitoring two Twitter accounts for myself and it is hard to keep up with them.
My Backroadsnews account is general newspaper/media/personal stuff while my Ksredrider is for my political thoughts, because I figured my newspaper readers would not want a constant barrage of radical political rants.
I have my Backroadsnews on my Tweetdeck and my Ksredrider on my regular Twitter page. That format works okay for me (I wish I could have a tweetdeck with two profiles) but the harder part is keeping some decent output going on the two Twitter accounts and also my blog.
Anyway, interesting post. I’m sure someone will create something soon to either help the situation… or make it worse with more options.
-Dan
One more thought.
What I REALLY want is a “Me 2.0” where I could have one site that would include everything I do on the web. Little widgets for my Twitters, blog, Ning groups, etc., but also for any comments I post on other blogs, all on one page.
It would be a complete record of my internet activity (with the option to keep certain things off that site so people don’t know how much attention I pay to breeding show rabbits or something… I still need a cool factor there. 😉
I think this idea could make someone rich. I just don’t know how to write it.
@Brackroadsnews Check out FriendFeed. It doesn’t almost everything you want to do.
I get what you are saying with confusion. That’s why my new Twitter account and blog will only get hit with the browser–keep it simple.
Check out Twirl instead of Tweetdeck for managing multiple accounts.
You’re awesome. Thanks. I’ll check them out.
I feed a lot of my stuff to a Tumblr account just as a record for myself. I guess that’s kind of weird, but I do it anyway.
It is hard to figure out if the “{reader]” and “[blog]” post you can do in Twitter. Personally, I’m fine with them if there aren’t too many.
@jacklail that’s sort of how I see it…as long as I’m not being bombarded with them, I don’t mind them. One or two every is not a big deal. More than that and it just becomes a feed.