by Nancy Yos

Created on: June 23, 2009

Twitter might replace blogging only if it takes on the two characteristics that blogging and Facebook share, and very un-Twitter like characteristics they are: namely, room for longer posts, and the easy to see, easy to understand, almost tactile pleasures of a Facebook page.

I am on Twitter, but I never cease to be amazed at the influence that this micro-blogging platform is rumored to have. Luckily, in my web surfing I came across instructions on how to upload blog posts there, which spares me any need to "tweet" about what I'm doing now. (Why yes, I do need to buy cat litter today.) So for what it's worth, the two main sites from which I earn a little money are fed to Twitter automatically, and maybe my followers will go look at them and I'll earn a fractional penny. For the rest of it - it's a bore. "What are you doing?" really shouldn't be the prompt for those of us who use it. Rather, "whom are you ignoring?" is more to the point.

Twitter is great for amassing big numbers of people whom you can "follow" and who can follow you, but unless I just have no clue how to make the system work for me, it seems that we none of us have any incentive to actually read what we are following. We have no incentive to follow through. Rather, we're all thinking the same thing: I'm busy and important. You follow me. I can log on today and start following five hundred new people and maybe get fifty in return, but so what? We are all collecting symbolic scalps (to use a kind of icky metaphor), but Twitter's great disadvantage, its non-selling point if you will, is precisely that anonymity and that ease of pointless contact. Even the look of a Twitter homepage, a blank list of tweets from my "followers," has about it a weird aura of tunnel vision. Who are all these people making words? Where are they? Who cares?

Facebook, in its use of pictures and its arrangement of the page into visible sets of contacts with the course of everyone's thoughts clearly outlined in time and topic, is much more appealing to use. The drawback, of course, is that the very human-ness of it limits the networking you can do there. Facebook feels and looks like a family or at least a neighborhood gathering, and no one wants to just "become friends with" anybody who asks. I've got five times as many followers on Twitter as I have Facebook "friends." (I won't embarrass myself with the actual numbers.) Professionally, Twitter should be more valuable to me. But Facebook is much more fun, and that's where I go.

Both micro-platforms also of course lack the space for really stretching out and writing, which most bloggers love to do and which all writers are in the game for. Who doesn't think he's way more important and interesting than he can ever convey to strangers in 140 characters? That tweet is supposed to be a tease, I guess, for what we really do, and getting people to communicate like that was a brilliant idea. But the very experience of Twitter, now just a list of surreal anonymous chattering, shuts the door on any desire to click that link and pursue the rest of that stranger's brilliant thought, and deliver up to him that fractional penny. And that one's, and that one's. Twitter has become about me, and about Driving Traffic to My Site. And if all of us are driving traffic to my site, how can we spare the time to bother driving traffic to yours?

Of the three platforms, Twitter, Facebook, and plain old blogging, I'll predict that Twitter, ne plus ultra of trendiness that it may still be, will be the one soonest forgotten. There's just not enough there there.

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