by Joe Makintosh

Created on: May 03, 2009

Twitter is a "Mircoblogging" platform which requires users to post their updates in 140 characters or less. While this can be a challenge as opposed to normal blogging which does not have a limit of how long the posts can be, there is fear throughout the Blogosphere that Twitter is what Blogging will evolve in to in the years to come. There are a number of reasons that Twitter is growing and threatens the blogosphere.

We are the generation of speed. Fast food, fast Internet, fast money, fast cars, fast thoughts. We measure time in nanoseconds whereas our ancestors measured in seasons. We have gigabytes of information in seconds whereas merely our parents waited hours for a picture to download. We are stuck on fast forward. Blogging is no acception. We do not want to spend hours writing a four hundred word blog post about our dog, we want to have a though, take a few seconds to write it and done! Our thoughts are out there for the whole world to see.

As well as speed, Twitter is also a great marketing platform as long as you do it right. Enough followers and you can make a lot of money from Twitter as well as gain interest in your professional skills. Some people do this by posting links that pay them for each time the link is clicked, others offer freelance skills like writing or graphic design to make cash. Twitter is a powerful tool for this because everyone is connected, not unlike the fact that everyone is connected by seven people idea. You follow someone, the link to your twitter is on their page. If they have thousands of follower a lot of them may follow you. Their followers will follow you, and the followers of the followers of your follower will possibly follow you and so on and so forth. Having thousands of followers and posting one link can mean big money.

Conventional blogging is not as strong for this because they are unhinged. Sure you comment on other blogs and advertise your blog but that takes up that valuable time we have already established. Even then, what are the chances they will venture to your blog AND click a link that makes you money? Not alot.

This fact can be proved in one way. On my current twitter page I have 16 links that other people have posted, the majority of them are advertisements.

While blogging may be on the decline you need to ask yourself one question. Is that a good thing? A lot of blogs out there are really boring and they could easily be twitter posts. With a lot of people wanting to spurt out every thought they have on twitter a lot of the blogs around in the future will have more interesting, thought provoking posts. Twitter can be a good thing as well, as rambling is a bad thing, but having to ramble in one-hundred and forty characters? Impossible.

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