Slightly Remarkable

I read. A lot. No, not novels or fiction (and not the dictionary, either). I read a lot of news and blogs. That’s where the everyday content lives; the new and upcoming. It’s a source of ideas and knowledge and insight that can’t be obtained anywhere else. I subscribe to an overwhelming number of sites and (mostly) keep up with them every day. But sometimes, the quality of these sites declines over time.

One such example, which was difficult for me to part with, is CNET News. I started reading CNET News for tech news several years ago, and some of the content is still great (particularly those reviews on home theater systems with video included!), but I’ve grown tired of the excessive amount of useless content that I’m forced to sift through each day.

I feel like CNET has gone overboard with publishing too much content, instead of just the good stuff. I feel like a kid whose Oreos have lost their filling. It gets worse, though. There’s just too much editorial mud-slinging and speculative, biased opining. Why must every news event be a conspiracy? Why are there 8,000 “news” posts on Google Buzz making a few minor adjustments, as if they’re a big deal? (For the record, I know business owners who’ve begun using Google Buzz over other products because they are integrated into GMail and other Google Services, making their content distribution streamlined and simple; and this is what Twitter and similar networking services have missed: they’re too isolated. Google wins, again.)

All right. The rambling is over for now, folks. But if you’re out there and you’re a content provider — blogger, news site, whatever — please, please don’t just throw content at your readers, because you’ll lose them. And if you fill a niche for conspiracy theories and government cover-ups, that’s fine, but if your purpose is to report the news as it happened, then please, do just that, and skip all the garbage. It’s frustrating.

Don Reisenger, whom I’ve recently begun following on Twitter, is a news columnist that mostly talks about tech updates, but also does a piece every now and again providing tips or ideas for various services or software. Today, Reisenger discussed how to be a better Tweeter and explained several useful tips for the self-acclaimed promotional types.

I’m not really here to disagree or dissect Reisenger’s compilation of information on Twitter self-promotion techniques, which he has so eloquently refined, but the following statement from his article today made me think:

Look, I’m really happy to hear about your life and what’s going on, but I don’t need to be inundated with items you’re adding to Google Reader or songs currently playing on your computer. Maybe someone cares, but when I see my stream being overrun with automatic updates, it annoys me. Don’t do it. Please.

He’s right, you know. If you’re streaming music on Last.FM all day (like me), you probably will watch the number of followers on your Twitter profile diminish quickly. If Reisenger wouldn’t follow you, no one would (seriously, he’s following nearly 5,000 people!). Okay, maybe your sister and stay-at-home aunt in Oklahoma, but those are the few exceptions.

I would have liked to see Reisenger not just identify the problem with tweeting updates that most people won’t care about, but also identifying the solution to this problem — and it is quite simple. There are services to provide that kind of information to an audience that may be interested. In other words, your “I am going to eat dinner” status updates could be isolated to Facebook (who uses MySpace anymore? That’s so 2002), you can keep your audio scrobbling at Last.FM, your Google Reader or Bloglines blogroll can be followed by people who are interested in it (which, I have come to realize, is typically only viewed by people to see if they are on the list), your professional profile, resume and connections can be managed via LinkedIn, and your links and bookmarks can be managed by — well, whatever you choose. (I’m still loving del.icio.us, although there are a lot of competitors in this area nowadays.)

In any case, if you get my point, it’s that Twitter also has its place. Twitter doesn’t exist to be the centralized location where all of your other updates are forwarded to. It’s for the audience of your followers who are more interested in what they can discover, learn, relate to, or otherwise discuss via the @reply system. So, like Reisenger suggests, keep it clean; if not for your own ability to attain vast numbers of followers (which seems to be Reisenger’s goal — and he’s doing a great job), keep your tweets relevant and concise for the benefit of your loyal followers. It’s not just good practice for promotion, it’s good old-fashioned courtesy.

I mentioned that Twitter doesn’t exist to be the central location for all of your social networking updates, but unlike Reisenger I’m going to point out a solution for this, too. A service known as FriendFeed solves the issue by tapping into all of your social networking services (seriously, from YouTube to Reddit and beyond) and producing what’s known as a “lifestream.” You can get your friends to sign up as well, and you can keep all of these updates centralized there. Fine. Do that on FriendFeed, not on Twitter, and I’ll follow you on Twitter, and the folks interested in knowing your every breath can follow you on FriendFeed.

Oh, and there’s another service similar to FriendFeed called SocialThing!, which is in a private beta at the time of writing. I don’t know if it’ll be better, but if you look at the home page of my blog, you’ll see the sidebar on the right has a sort of lifestream (powered, of course, by FriendFeed). That’s where everything is centralized.

A little side note (this I did tweet), Reisenger mentions in his article that he also uploads photos to his Twitter account:

Have you ever taken pictures and uploaded them to a service like Twitpic so you could post it in your Twitter stream? If you haven’t, your followers are missing out.

Sending pictures is a great way to add more value to Twitter and make you a better Tweeter. Let’s face it: who really wants to look at text all day? Your followers might actually like pictures better than your regular updates.

That’s why I’ve uploaded pictures from my wedding. It turns out my followers would rather see pictures of my wife than hear what I have to say.

I laughed at that last statement. I haven’t checked, but something tells me Reisenger is a very lucky man.

I have not yet tried the Twitpic service, although I may at some point, but I prefer links over images in twitter updates, myself; just give me a link to photos or a Web site that is visually interesting.

One last note: I’m glad Reisenger is a “tweeter” and not a “twitterer” — because “twitterer” just sounds silly.