Microblogging and the mitigation of Facebook schizophrenia
I’ve finally relented and signed up for Twitter. I’m seeing it as a temporary stay of my schizophrenia issues with Facebook. The feature I like best in Facebook is the status update. Twitter is a whole service just dedicated to this feature. In the Facebook status update I was loathed to make work related status updates that my personal friends wouldn’t understand. Twitter though is only being used by my work related friends, so there’s no audience confusion there yet.
So that I’d be able to see tweets as they came through I installed a Twitter widget into my Netvibes page. The first thing that struck me is how much it looks like an instant messaging (IM) client. Some peoples’ tweets are just interesting to read, but some I’d quite like to reply to. There’s of course then the potential for replies it to become threaded conversations like in IM. Unlike IM though all my tweets will be seen by everyone following me. Some of them won’t be following the person I’m having a discussion with. What will these one sided conversations look like to others? Will they annoy people? Will it make people stop following me on Twitter? I’ve seen a similar phenomenon on Bebo when people use public comments as a discussion, and you can only see the side of the person you’re connected to, not their friend.
Microblogging is certainly a powerful and useful new medium. It adds to email, email groups, blogging, social networks, txt messaging, and IM as another tool for communication and presence awareness, and provides something slightly different and complementary. The way it will impact on this growing ecosystem of tools and services remains to be seen. I’ll watch with interest as the way the crossover between microblogging and IM unfolds.