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Dougal notes that he has ditched the daily Twitter posts:
“Just as with my daily del.icio.us link posting experiment in the past, I have decided to discontinue my automated daily Twitter summary.”
By all that is precious in this world, thank-you. If I want to read your tweets, I’ll follow you. If I want to see your daily del.icio.us hoarding, I’ll subscribe to that feed too.
Blogs that I once read every day — often with quite some anticipation — have become at best a catch-all for random comment, pointless new-media fads and scraped mindless regurgitation, all of which have their own place and time.
I cannot help but echo Shawn Blanc, who perhaps said it best — “I want to read what you have to say.”
Glenn Wolsey on supporting developers:
Twitterrific 3.0 can be used completely free of charge if you wish. Registering simply eliminates advertising from the tweet timeline.
I’m with Glenn on this one. Although not a full-time Mac user, I have and continue to use Twitterrific, whilst I may not necessarily pay for the privilege of posting to twitter given the number of alternative softwares available, I have absolutely no issue with the developer adding vetted, quality advertising via The Deck.
TwitterNotes lets you leverage your existing Twitter membership to track and manage quick notes to yourself, including sending private notes.
One of the greatest joys in disabling comments, is an immediate and somewhat blunt end to spam.
I no longer have to concern myself with cleaning up the mess left by others, scrubbing away textual graffiti that wastes time and money, in the form of wanton bandwidth waste.
It’s bad enough the would-be viagra and porn magnates have to confront us with their wares, the insult is that they pay absolutely nothing for the storage and dissemination of their content, then take to insulting those who stand against them.
Case in point? Tumblr rocks, because there is no comment system, with a zero-tolerance stance against spam1. Instead, it strongly promotes a community where people respond via their own tumblr presence.
It’s a simple system, that works amazingly well — so well in fact, that it’s often the benchmark for other like-minded ideas. You know there is something special happening when you become a benchmark, just as Twitter has.
Whilst others offer more features, twitter still does the one-single-thing remarkably well. It tracks what everyone is doing. Just.. what they are doing. Nothing more. And it works, because it’s such a simple premise, that anyone can grasp.
And it’s these wonderful new ways to communicate, via Tumblr to express and Twitter to respond, that the very way we engage on a daily basis, is changing at a fundamental level. We are all connected in an increasingly real-time fashion and have the opportunity to build, and continuing building communities, that defy many traditional or physical borders.
I know what many of you are doing, right now. I read your thoughts via your blog or tumble log, I see your Twitter or Pounce updates — and I am, whether I realise or not, part of a wider community as a result. A community that is increasingly moving towards platforms that simply do not allow for spam, or those whom perpetrate it.
And there is something to be said for the simpler approach. I have well and truly lost interest in facebook, because it tries to do so very much, that the entire point of it’s existence is somehow lost in all the noise. Sometimes, a simpler system has so many greater advantages.
We can make life difficult and cumbersome, by trying to have two way communication via a blogging platform, that is far more suited to dissemination of information, than discussion.. or, we can simplify life, using comment-less blogging to inform and real-time tools such as collaborative IM, twitter and pounce to fire debate.
Going comment free isn’t about disengaging or silencing the critics, rather, it inspires discussion and debate, by shifting the form of discussion to the right kinds of platforms, where spam cannot thrive and people can engage on a more community orientated level.
- .. a lesson blogspot could well learn (↩)
"This evening, through a perfectly innocent series of events, my left nipple became stuck to the inside of my freezer door." — best twitter update this week, bar none - thank you Mr Orchard.
"A glitch is causing some Twitterers to have surprising gains of thousands of new followers." — Including yours truely, who has jumped from 30 followers to 1,676 followers. My one moment of fame and it’s all a crock.
For those who haven’t caught on yet,
twitter is an example of web based technology that embraces a rapidly growing community by asking just one question: What are you doing?
Now, one can keep the world informed, via SMS, IM, or the website itself with any number of length restricted updates. But that can get a […]
"This morning I posted a comparison of the growth in messages with both Blogger and Twitter. The Twitter data was based on information collected by Andy Baio.." — why is kottke comparing two massively different concepts (blog verses community im) at all? ( #)
Quite probably the single best twitter applet out there right now - a lightweight, snazzy, Apollo powered applet with the coolest URI shortening tool (updates as you type) there is.. #
Just in case the naysayers’ amongst us still think
twitter’s star has already risen and fallen, may I present the results of what happens when one posts a link to one’s own blog:
As you can see - there’s been quite the burst of traffic in the last 48 hours, much of it as a result […]
"Twitteroo 1.5 is now available for download! But wait, that’s not all — the TwitterooCore API 1.4 is also available." — Twitteroo is still missing proxy support, but the upgrade is none-the-less a welcome improvement. #
