How to Survive Twitter?
This is not about solutions this is ….a cry for help? And yes I did read the Twitter Survival Guide. Let me start with defining the problem. Every blogger has his routine for writing blogposts. I mostly use a RSS Reader (GoogleReader). This is a collection of subscriptions to other blogs of interest, PubMed searches and content from scientific journals. Next I also check e-mail subscriptions and certain websites. I mostly discuss articles published in medical journals but also link to other blogs and websites. On average writing for my blog takes 1 to 2 hours per day.
Twitter started coming up in all sorts of sources. At first I was in denial, couldn’t figure out what twitter could do for me. Next after exploring some I started using twitter to promote my blog. Even installed several wordpress plugins to automatically publish my posts to twitter. But these plugins were buggy, even posted the drafts I was preparing for my blog. This drove some of my twitter followers to despair (Laikas). This made me deactivate the plugins and now I have to post my blogposts by hand to twitter.
Next I started microblogging. Some entries in my RSS reader of interest I posted directly to twitter, some interesting articles on websites and other links soon followed. These were interesting articles and posts but not interesting enough for my blog or somewhat off topic.
My number of folllowers grew including bloggers I knew from blogging or other social networks. Interacting with these bloggers was my next achievement on twitter and very rewarding. I received very quick replies on answers and very good solutions as well. @mdbraber even helped me with recovering my blog after a failed upgrade.
I started using TweetDeck, read the survival guide for twitter and another book about twitter recently reviewed on this blog. Next I was text messaging to twitter, showing pictures and would certainly also like to let everybody know were I was. A lot of twitter suggestions from TwiTip quickly found their way to my daily trials.
But after a while I realized that a lot of time and energy was dedicated to twitter and time and attention shifted from my blog to twitter. Now I have a hard time focusing on one or the other. Have to turn off TweetDeck to get some blogging done. Really deep down I prefer blogging.
So were to go from here? Any suggestions, please let me know in the comments, every comment appreciated even when it hurts.
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January 2, 2009 @ 1:03 pm
I prefer blogs too. I haven’t really explored twitter, because I don’t see why I would want to follow micoblogging, being a lesser diciplined version of blogs.
January 2, 2009 @ 2:17 pm
I have a similar conundrum. Widgets, wordpress plug-ins, ping.fm, Firefox extensions. Where do I start? “Be active on Facebook and Linked In, and post on Digg”. Soon my head will explode.
January 2, 2009 @ 5:45 pm
Thanks James. In this holiday season I am trying to find out the use and benefits of the things you just named in your comment. Will keep you posted. Twiter seems a good thing with some benefits but need to find some time for it.
Kind regards Dr Shock
January 2, 2009 @ 6:19 pm
What works best for me is to follow a small number (50) of people and get their tweets in Google Talk via TwitterSpy. This setup turns twitter into just another, somewhat noisier but still managable, Google Talk conversation window that can be ignored whenever I’m busy. TwitterSpy has the added advantage of allowing ‘track’, which sends me tweets happening anywhere on the twitter network whenever they include words I ‘track’ (e.g. dopamine, serotonin, chrisharris, iplant). @Felix, Twitter is not just a smaller version of blogging – unlike blogging it allows real-time conversations.
January 2, 2009 @ 7:49 pm
@Christopher
That sounds very nice, will look into it, especially the feature ‘track’ appeals to me, thanks and kind regards,
Dr Shock
January 2, 2009 @ 8:18 pm
Here’s how to set it up
http://www.techlifeweb.com/2008/07/07/how-to-set-up-twitterspy-in-google-talk/
January 2, 2009 @ 8:55 pm
@christopher. Thanks found it
January 4, 2009 @ 7:47 pm
the immediate feedback of twitter (earlier chatrooms, msn, list-serves before that)is addictive. i suspect it’s a brain thing. too bad there are only 24 hours in a day. when you look back at the end of the year, or your life, what do you want to have spent it doing?
January 5, 2009 @ 11:28 am
Also take a look at http://scienceroll.com/2009/01/04/10-tips-how-to-filter-discussions-on-twitter/ .
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