Twitter is not Blogging!

I love reading Steve Hodson’s blog WinExtra! He cracks me up! He’s straight to the point and his style of writing brings an audio monologue of my grandfather to mind as I read his text.

Don’t worry Steve, that’s meant as a compliment as my grandfather is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met! I’m not making any reference to your age!

Today I was reading Steve’s post “Twitter: who’s making the money & other notes” where he wonders “where the money?” and notes that the folks really making the money from Twitter, at the moment, are the (American) mobile phone operators. We’re lucky over here that most of us Europeans don’t pay to receive an SMS!

Here’s a question though and I am sure it is one that will irritate people like Steve Rubel but where’s the money. After all with the rapid popularity of everything Twitter site’s like David Troy’s are going to start costing money to upkeep regardless of how noble Mr. Rubel believes it is for David not to be making any money

I think Steve Rubel may already have been contemplating the money last night with regards to Twittervision! 

At the end of Steve Hodson’s post he pointed to a post by Scott Karp of The Blog Herald the title of which is “Twitter Lowers the Bar for Blogging“.

I really think Scott is missing the point here. Twitter is not blogging!

I agree with Scott that:

I think Twitter is a well-executed application, which, like all technologies, is only good or bad in how it is used. What strikes me about Twitter is that it appears to be accentuating the natural exhibitionist and voyeuristic tendencies of avid blog writers and readers. While blog posts have traditionally been short, Twitter pushes this trend to the extreme, accentuating the attention deficit disorder that the web naturally fosters.

and:

I’m not suggesting that Twitter isn’t a fascinating form of publishing and communication, and that there isn’t much to learn from the phenomenon. There are elements of mobility and instantaneity that can’t be achieved through blogging software. The issue I’m raising here is what happens when people start Twittering instead of longer-form blogging — by long, I mean even a paragraph.

Even I’ve called Twitter blogging at one point, however, the more I think about it the more I’m convinced that it’s not.

No matter how exhibitionist, voyeuristic or immediate Twitter is, it is still little more than a glorified IRC channel. Don’t get me wrong! I love Twitter, and it does have some cool advantages over IRC such as being able to filter out the noise by “un-friending” people, but it’s still just IRC with bells and whistles and SMS!

Steve Hodson wrote:

And Scott let me just say this Twitter is NOT .. let me repeat NOT blogging. It might be free association IM’ing to the crowd but it is not blogging.

So what will happen when people start Twittering instead of longer-form blogging?

Not much! You can’t express ideas or opinions properly in 140 characters. 140 characters is great for a “brain fart“, or quickly getting feedback or to link to a website or blog post, but not for much else.

Twitter will evolve and develop it’s own ecosystem that smart bloggers will use as a tool to enable better blogging and notify their “followers” of new posts.

Rex Dixon wrote:

I don’t think twitter is about to replace blogging. I think blogging just received an enhancement tool to use. If you use it like Pete does, or Steve, or Robert, then you are using twitter the way that it can help to alert your users to new stories or cool ones you just wrote.

Really smart bloggers will not “mind fart” their ideas on to Twitter, but will watch other peoples Twitters for ideas that will make good full posts.

I really feel that if people abandon blogging for Twitter then the blogosphere will be a better place because of it.

Look at how many people start blogs and never maintain them! Technorati is tracking 71.8 million blogs and I have no doubt that 50% of them have never been updated more than a handful of times or are splogs and flogs! Then you have all the authors who have more than one blog!

Twitter can fill a need for all these people who want to blog, but either lack the skill or inclination to write a blog post!

Currently a lot of the top Twitter users are the tech elite and the early adopters (Scoble is the number 1 “Twit” if you measure followers but a long way from being the number 1 in terms of updates: Twitterholic.com), but as Twitter becomes more known, expect it to be filled with the flotsam that find services such as MySpace and Bebo to difficult to use.

Sure the blogosphere may loose a handful of good bloggers to Twitter because they love the immediacy of Twitter versus the quickness of blogging, but they probably weren’t happy blogging anyway and will move on to the next “immediate” thing once something comes along to compete with our outshines Twitter.

To finish up I’m going to indulge my own “exhibitionist tendencies” by saying that you can follow me on Twitter, but while you’re at it, why not vote for me on FuelMyBlog. You know you want to!