I’ve said for years that if you can’t be found in Google search results, you may not exist. (I also heard this from Phil Cooke.) I don’t mean that about people – just websites. Now I’m beginning to say the same thing about Twitter. If you’re website’s feed isn’t fed to Twitter in some way, shape, or form, you may not exist.
Robert Scoble posted a note to Posterous about why he doesn’t use Google Reader anymore. I read his article, tried his tactic, and ten minutes later switched back to my ultra-dependence on Google Reader as my lifeline to the web. Nonetheless, I think Scoble raises an interesting point about the evolution of the web. After all, not everyone feels the need to see every story from every blog to which they subscribe like some of us.
Ten years ago, search became ultra-important. the SEO field boomed. In those olden days, you showed up on Google, people found you, and they subscribed to your feed. This is obviously still a vital way of connecting with the public and you really need to understand RSS.
Now, however, we may see a major wave of people moving beyond feed-reading to dependence upon their preferred social media streams to be up-to-date. Why? Well, I think…
- Social media streams are people and relationship oriented, not information oriented.
- Social media streams are quicker (for now at least) at broadcasting the latest and greatest.
- Social media streams show what’s popular among the new, so the more people reading something, the more accessible it is.
All of this has changed just a bit with the introduction of Twitter lists. People are all over them. Over 6.5 million have been created as of this morning, and they’ve only gone live to everyone in the last 72 hours. Yes, Facebook and Friendfeed (and other networks) have had lists for some time, but Twitter is different.
So when I ran my ten-minute experiment on moving to Twitter as an RSS reader, three factors caught my attention.
- Many sites I currently read don’t have any Twitter icon / option / stream on their home page at all.
- Twitter doesn’t work for me like it does for Robert Scoble because the good stuff gets pushed down under the more often-tweeted but less important stuff. One active Twitterer on a list can effectively drive good content down out of reach.
- A few sites still don’t even get the power of RSS – no icon at all.
Here’s my extremely simple point. Be on Twitter. I’ll meet you there.
The same is with me, I can’t function without RSS and Google Reader (on my machine I use NetNewsWire). With RSS, the news is always there and it stays there. With Twitter, you must be almost all the time on Twitter to be up-to-date. And that is waste of time.
What I realized, it is better to follow 400 or 500 Twitter users with quality tweets than 10.000 with spamming tweets and with no content.
And congratulations to the new design.
BlogInterface.net´s last blog ..The Quality Of Blog Comments
Thanks so much! Glad you like it.
Hi Brian,
I understand where you are coming from in terms of being on Twitter. But for some companies, existence on Twitter just doesn’t fit,or shall I say “it’s complicated”.
At my day job we have a website with thousands of pages, we sell thousands of technical books and related products to over 140 different industry sectors. So for us, we would need to hire at least 2 – 3 people just to decide what we are going to tweet and who we are going to tweet to. I know tweeting just seems so simple but when you have that many products, it can be very overwhelming.
I think some of us (not me personally) are waiting around thinking that Twitter is just a fad, so it might not be worth our time.
On the other hand as a blogger, I agree with you 100%. Twitter is an essential part of my marketing strategy.
Thanks for the post.
ileane´s last blog ..Postereous – Lifestreaming or Not?
You’ve got a good point. I guess it would be good to clarify that if your site is conducive to RSS, then it should be on Twitter, in most cases. Thanks!
Wow, this is very interesting Ileane, it’s really amazing that Twitter has opened the door for more employers!
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Well, I am glad that I exists in this world :)
God points in this post, Twitter it filing our lives, I had this thought before about ordering Pizza just by tweeting about it!
Hesham´s last blog ..How to Move from Bloggers Blog to Wordpress Self Hosted Blog in less than 3 Minutes?
It’s amazing that nobody had heard of it just a few years ago, and even Google itself is only a decade old. My how times move fast!
Twitter got all the luck that big websites couldn’t get it, maybe because it was the most simple website ever!
sorry Brandon for the typos, I was typing fast from my other laptop, keys are different and my brain is suffering :)
Hesham´s last blog ..Is your Kid a Computer Geek?
Nice post. Just followed you on Twitter.
Design Informer´s last blog ..Free Under Construction XHTML/CSS Template
Really nice post to existence in this world through twitter. Thanks for sharing this nice post and thanks for your experiment.