Is Twitter replacing your RSS?

More and more, I find myself  checking Twitter when I’m waiting at traffic lights, in line at the grocery store or killing time when a meeting begins five minutes late. 

I realized that though Google Reader is technically just as accessible via my PDA, checking it while on-the-go is not my user habit.  It feels cumbersome and too complicated (in depth?) for those quick on-the-go moments. I am not sure, however, whether this is a function of the interface or of the content, itself.

I wondered if others have the same user habit, so I threw out a tweet this morning asking:

 mixtmedia: When you’re out & about, do you check your RSS reader or Twitter more regularly? Is it a function of the interface or the content? 

 

I received some interesting and surprisingly consistent responses, with two main summary points:

1. Twitter content is the mobile news of preference; RSS requires more time, focus and pixels
2. iPhone and other mobile apps make Twitter an easier on-the-go resource than RSS readers 

Thanks Twitter friends (below) for your responses!

 

 guyma: @mixtmediadepends on situation – if waiting for something or someone, I’ll pull out iPhone to check RSS or Twitter. Helps me stay aware.

 biznickman: @mixtmediaI check my Twitter when I’m out … not my RSS feed since it’s unreadble on my phone and I can’t save pages I liked 

   mrscarpediem: @mixtmedia- I check more when I’m out. It’s an app on my iPhone so it gives me something to do standing in lines, etc.  

  gregcangialosi: @mixtmediaI definitely check twitter more often on the go using Twitterific, over my RSS. Its quicker, easier, and often interesting   

girluninterrupt: @mixtmediaI check Twitter, Brightkite, loopt and Facebook constantly. Thanks to iPhone apps!

ericaholt: @mixtmediaOn the go? I check Twitter more often from my smartphone than G Reader, which I mostly read when I’ve got more than a minute  

 EndTheRoboCalls: @mixtmediaI seem to spend more time on Twitter these days. It is substituting for RSS readers…. without me realizing it.  

 Marc_Meyer: @mixtmediaits more a function of the moment and the opprtunity.. rss when its major downtime versus twitter on the go

 

 

Will Twitter Kill the Holiday Card?

I spent way too much time this weekend gathering snail mail addresses for the 250 (!) family photo holiday cards that we ordered and obligated ourselves to send.  As I e-mailed address requests to a few friends and contacts for whom I didn’t have up-to-date info, I wondered why the heck we were doing this in the first place.  Why is it, in this day and age of digital communications, are holiday cards still the cultural norm?

My husband and I philosophized about this as we stamped and licked, with our kids zooming around us playing “roar” — a chasing game in which they simply run after one another and “roar.”  In our grandparents’ generation, people “visited” one another at this time of year. They’d stop by one another’s houses on a Saturday or Sunday, have tea and cake and spend time with friends and extended family.  This practice is frowned upon today in our busy culture where time is sometimes more valued that family…. 

Holiday cards are the mid-20th century’s vestige of the previous era’s “visiting” custom. They are a once-a-year opportunity to show off our families, and thus ourselves, to our geographically scattered friends.  Holiday cards, to some extent, satiate our needs for holidayconnection, family showcasing and sharing our holiday spirit.

But, we’re now in the increasingly-digital 21st century.  When will the 20th century holiday card custom become extinct and what will replace it? 

E-cards are starting to gain traction for birthdays, especially when Plaxo reminds us to send them.  Evites are quickly overtaking invites for parties and events.  But, nonetheless, the hard-copy holiday card prevails. Its  digital counterpart still seems cheesy and lacks authenticity, even in an era when our hands ache when we have to write a four-sentence handwritten thank you note but when we “Blackberry” and “text” like player pianos. 

Then in the midst of pasting, sticking and stamping, I got a Twitter direct message, or “DM,” from blogger and social media consultant extraordinaire, Craig Stoltz (@craigstoltz), informing me about a post he’d just written entitled, “New Use for Twitter: End-of-Year Family Update Letters.”  I encourage you to read Craig’s post yourself, but the basic premise is that tweeting our year-in-review letters might be a better tact for both sender and recipient. 

I love his idea and encourage you all to use the hashtag that I’ve created based on Craig’s post: #YIR (stands for Year-In-Review) and tweet YOUR year-in-review. 

Despite the 250 hard copy holiday cards for 2008, here’s my #YIR:

What’s all the fuss about Twitter?

A great report just came out this morning (from Pistachio Consulting) detailing the microsharing landscape and effective ways microsharing is being used by organizations.  It’s definitely worth a look. 

I follow @Pistachio on Twitter and she (Laura Fitton) is smart, witty, humorous and has excellent insights about social media.  The report provides an overview of 19 microsharing applications and classifies them in a matrix of subcategories.  (I suppose with six subcategories, it’s hard to put them in a 2×2, but that would be a great way to show similarities and differences.)  The report provides advantages and reservations for each app and then puts each in a comparison grid against 20 or so attributes. 

As far as I know, this is the first comprehensive analysis of the microsharing space to date.  It’s nice to see it being taken so seriously as a business opportunity and imperative.  The value of the ambient awareness and content bursts of microsharing is really tough to understand until you are doing it and really tough to do until you understand it enough to see the value.  I’m @mixtmedia on Twitter.  Follow me, follow @Pistachio, follow @marciamarcia (a contributor to Pistachio’s amazing microsharing report) and start to understand…

Inability to comment on comments stifles the conversation

I just finished reading Keith Burtis’ great guest post on Chris Brogan’s blog, “Twitter- To Converse or to Broadcast-THAT is the Question.”  As I scrolled and skimmed through the comments to get down to the bottom and add my own comment, it dawned on me how strange it is that the participatory medium of blogs that are all about conversation and collaboration do not allow people to comment on comments.

Sure, you can explicitly refer to what commenter “Starfish” said when you, yourself, are commenting, but this requires others to scroll back up and try to find “Starfish’s” comment, then scroll back down to your comment and then down again to insert their own comment.  This is cumbersome, not collaborative.

I often find the same challenge in using Twitter: I @reply to someone’s tweet to start or continue a conversation, but maybe I’ve been in meetings for the past two hours and the tweet that I’m latching on to is a tweet from much earlier that day.  I feel the need to sort of recap the initial tweet and then add my insight or addition–tough in 140 characters.  From being on the other side of some of @replies I know it’s sometimes difficult to to figure out to which tweetstream they’re referring.

As I commented–yes, linearly, because what other choice did I have?–on Keith’s post, the broadcast problem is threefold.  First, we Digital Immigrants, are still getting our sea legs when it comes to participatory media.  Collaboration is not our comfort zone.  We want try out the latest social networking tool, but find it uncomfortable to put ourselves out there, trust “strangers,” and give away our ideas for free.  It’s a cultural issue. 

The second issue is the adoption continuum.  Remember 1994 when email was still fairly new?  Little by little friends and family members were ”getting on email,” as we said back in the day.  The user habit was to write an email letter–yep, these were long messages–to your friend.  Then once you’d gone back and forth a few times and had nothing else to say, the “forwards” would start.  From jokes, to consumer warnings, to limericks, you were one recipient on your friend’s mass distribution list.  At first this was funny and you, too, would forward these inane messages along to your friends who were “on email.”  But “funny” quickly soured and turned into annoying.  You moved on.  You started using email as a productive communication tool rather than as a toy.  It became a seamless part of your daily communications.

The same adoption continuum exists for social media.  First we sign up for a service and then probably forget about it for awhile.  Then we passively observe the landscape.  Next we dip our toes in and blurt and broadcast, “I had pizza for lunch!”  Then we settle in and start sharing useful and mildly interesting information with our followers…but we’re still operating in a 1.0 broadcast paradigm.  As we build our follower networks, we begin to see the value of social media.  Suddenly we “get it”: we have this mindshift that it’s not about us, it’s about them.  Broadcast is about increasing value for the creator; social media is about increasing value for everyone else.

The third and final piece of the broadcast problem is that the blog and microblog platform infrastructures are, too, still evolving and are not yet truly conducive to the collaboration that their content is trying to encourage.  I’d be interested in hearing if anyone knows of a blogging platform that truly facilitates collaborative discussions.  I can envision a clickable mindmapping kind of visualization.

Twitter challenges for government agencies

Today I read and commented on Silicon Valley Insider’s post “The US Government Catches The Twitter Bug, And Amazingly, Does It Well” by Eric Krangel.  In the post Eric asserts that “some of the best and most innovative new media experiments going on right now on the Internet are coming from the U.S. federal government.” I agree with him.  Some of the most innovative and insightful 2.0 thinking that I’ve encountered has come from government folks including Mark Drapeau, Chris Rasmussen and Andrea Baker.

As I commented on Krangel’s post, I agree with Mark Drapeau’s assessment that “although Twitter is a very conversational medium, they [government agencies] have very little interaction with other users.”  While some of the examples of government tweeting mentioned are, indeed, good data being pushed, most are very 1-way, or 1.0.

There are two other related challenges for government agencies–as well as for corporations and other organizations.  First, they are NOT a single person. Even if the agency/corporation assigns an individual to be its “face” in the 2.0 world, how can a single person “be” an enormous organization in the real-time mode of a platform like Twitter?

The second challenge is a Catch-22 of 2.0: Web 2.0 is about authenticity, transparency and participation. These attributes add up to having a single persona, blurring the line between personal self and professional self. How can that individual whose job it is to be the “face” of a given agency/corporation/organization truly be authentic and transparent if he/she is supposed to be representing that agency/corporation/organization?  And yet…. how can he/she NOT be fully authentic and transparent in representing the agency/organization in the 2.0 world where anything less than full disclosure yields skepticism and distrust, thus defeating the very purpose of participating in 2.0 in the first place?