Am I blogging less, or tweeting more?
If you’ve been watching this blog, you probably noticed that I’ve started using Twitter. For a guy who develops web applications for a living I’m a relatively late entry into the social media phenomenon. Once I got an iPhone, something changed. I no longer needed to be chained to my computer in order to share a thought. Also the standard keypad on my previous phone was just horrible to type any sort of meaningful message on.
With the iPhone and Twitter’s 140 character limit, that’s no longer a problem. I don’t often have time to write a lengthy blog post, but it’s pretty easy now to dash off a quick thought and even include a picture or map coordinates.
For the moment, I’ve settled on Twittelator Pro as my iPhone Twitter client of choice. Granted, I haven’t tried them all, but I like the feature set and it seems about as stable as anything else on the iPhone, which granted isn’t saying too much.
I’ve also discovered Twhirl to use on my Mac, which I really like. It’s an Adobe AIR application, so it’ll run on Windows as well if you’re stuck with a PC. 
I can just leave it open all the time and it posts new tweets as they come in.
I now have Twitter cross-posting to this blog and Facebook. I discovered LoudTwitter which posts a daily archive of the day’s tweets to a new post here so I can archive my deep thoughts for future generations. Since I’m using a Wordpress plugin to post tweets as they happen, I don’t really need the daily archive to be posted to the blog. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to keep LoudTwitter’s posts private yet. So every day I have to log in and hide the posts. Still working out a few kinks.
So I guess I’m blogging more in one sense, and less in another. I have more choices now at least. I would have felt kind of guilty posting a one sentence blog post, but Twitter’s enforced limit is very freeing in a paradoxical way.
Another side benefit of Twitter’s character limit is that it encourages good writing skills. Here, I can ramble on forever, but Twitter forces you to think and write in a concise way. Before posting a tweet, I’m getting in the habit of boiling down my thoughts to their essence.
If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, I’m ZippySeven. http://twitter.com/zippyseven
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