Interesting Twitter updates followed by a rant

A few interesting Twitter updates from the past month or two…

* Someone needs to invent a Capri-Sun style single-serving wine pouch.
* Just got RickRolled by a restaurant Muzak system.
* I love how marketing departments say “it tastes earthy” when they mean “it tastes like dirt.”
* This town needs an automat.


<rant>
I’ve ranted and raved in comments before about people who use the automatic daily-Twitter-digest-to-blog-post services, but I am not sure that I made an actual blog post about it yet. So here goes. This is specifically in reference to a post Addlepated made today, but in general applies to anyone and everyone.

People of the blogosphere: if you are blindly posting all of your tweets to your blog, please stop. The same goes for your Delicious links.

While everyone calls Twitter “microblogging,” it really ends up being a bunch of ephemeral messages, announcements, and conversations. It is often used more like instant messaging than blogging, the content of which doesn’t really jive with being an automated digest to cross-post to a blog. I don’t cross-post every tweet for much the same reason I don’t cross-post IM or IRC logs. Or in this context, it would not even be the full log, just my half of the conversation. “@username blah blah blah” really doesn’t make sense without the preceding or following tweets.

Most of the people I follow in the blogoverse I also follow on Twitter (and if I don’t, it’s because I do not know you use it), so digest blog posts end up being a double-helping of information.

I am not suggesting keeping every last bit of Twitter-related goodness off of blog posts. Hand-picked conversations, in moderation, are wonderful! See my Twitter excerpts, above. Posting tweets is especially nice when they’re of general interest with a little bit of commentary or banter, giving context. Similarly, hand-picked snippets of IM or IRC conversation are great, too. It’s just the firehose of automated updates that ends up being annoying.

At the very least, if you continue to insist on including Twitter posts in the blog, please consider doing what Josh did–leaving those particular posts out of the WordPress RSS feed — or what Feedle did — no specific post/method to point to, but he blogs on LiveJournal and has them behind an lj-cut. I hate to be threatening, but I’ve already dropped some people from my reading list (both RSS and the LiveJournal default friends view) because of this.

So please, please, please, if you are considering cross-posting tweets to your blog, please don’t do so. Let Twitter do what it’s good at and let your blog do what it’s good at. Let them cross over only when it makes sense to do so.
</rant>

Posted in: Dear Diary Twitter

7 thoughts on “Interesting Twitter updates followed by a rant”

  1. Yeah, I wasn’t sure about doing the digest thing, for the same ephemerality that you mention. I was more interested in having the last few tweets show up in my sidebar. And I do think I’m going to take the blog posting off my Twitter since it’s rather annoying.

    But on the bright side, daily digest posts are only once per day, as opposed to each tweet being its own blog post. I’m sure I’ve got more than one daily tweet that’s ignorable. 😉

  2. Capri-sun style wine pouches almost exist. They sell them at Target. Granted, they’re in cardboard boxes, but its the same basic idea. 4 individually packaged single-serving “bottles” of wine. If you really wanted you could probably remove the cardboard from the outside and just drink directly from the plastic pouch.

  3. @CoffeeJedi The thing that sparked the juice-pouch comment was the fact that a lot of the local health food grocery have environmentally-friendly wine in tetrapacks (like big those cardboard soy-milk boxes) instead of glass bottles. There are also a few companies that make higher-quality box wines. Both of these examples are, at the minimum, 750ml in size and not really single-serving.

    So you’re describing wine in a juice box? Four single serving boxes? I think that’s an acceptable alternative to Capri-suns. I’m guessing they don’t have little pokey-straws, though. I may have to come up with those on my own–maybe cannibalizing them from actual juice boxes.

  4. I am indeed describing wine in a juice box. 🙂 Yeah, no poky straws. Ever drink wine out of a straw though? Yeah, me neither, I don’t think it would taste right though.

    I like those tetrapacks actually, I get a big 1.5 or 3 liter box of red and just sit it out on the counter. They claim it will last 40 days after opening (never lasts that long at my place though)

  5. Agree strongly. The people who dump tweets in their LJs all go in my “Jail.”

    My own feedburner feed has a daily delicious links attached, but I think that actually makes sense in a feed, especially since it is a different item.

    Twitter out of context COULD be fun, though, if we made a meta twitter that picked random twitters and twittered them itself.

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