July 20, 2008

Micro- and full-length-blogging use cases overlap greatly

Steven Hodson ranted on Mashable that Twitter is not a micro-blogging tool.  His case was, in essence, “Blogs are thoughtful and Twitter isn’t, so the two aren’t comparable.”  I disagree.  Hodson was over-glorifying blogging, while trivializing the broad variety of Twitter use cases.*  Consider, if you please, the following list of use cases that are met both by Twitter and by conventional blogging:

  1. Reporting on your life. By the way, I had a great first week in Grand Cayman, but now it’s raining heavily, which is a big part of the reason why I’m blogging.  Broadband is slow and my laptop is old, so being online is a bit frustrating, so I’m cutting a few corners in thoroughness.
  2. Expressing feelings. That’s pretty inseparable from #1.
  3. Bashing those who you feel need bashing. It works, too. 🙂
  4. Communicating news.
  5. Expressing analytical opinions.
  6. Promoting your services, opinions, and links.

*More precisely, Hodson was underrating the use cases for a version of Twitter that actually works, but I’ll try to refrain from posting at length again about that problem until I’ve looked into the changes at recent Twitter acquisition Summize.  That said, I think it will take Twitter quite a while, if it ever does, to recover from the terrible loss of momentum due to its lack of scalability.  Certainly my usage has dropped to near zero since the disastrous period in which they disabled the Replies search.

Comments

One Response to “Micro- and full-length-blogging use cases overlap greatly”

  1. William Shakespeare on September 1st, 2008 3:41 pm

    brevity is the soul of wit.

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