As part of my ongoing Twitter optimization, I have extracted a key optimization question: When you want to see an account’s content, should you follow them, or add them to a list? Or both? I suppose to the logical thing would be to determine what characteristics each has: Following allows you to subscribe to their updates via notifications.…
Is Twitter Replacing Blog Comments?
I just turned off comments on my blog. There are many reasons, but I think they’re best summarized by Matt Gemmell. Here are his big ones:
Anatomy of a Twitter Post: How to Obscure Narcissism with Wit
There are two reasons to read a book: one is to read it, and the other is tell people you read it. — Bertrand Russell First, let’s state the obvious: you need a bit of ego to maintain a Twitter account. Not to experiment, but to keep doing it. To do so you must believe that the world…
How To Decide Who To Friend on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter
this is not a picture related to boobs What follows is my method of deciding who to friend on the three major social networks: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Your method may differ; I get that. It’ll come off a bit pompous; I get that too. Facebook Facebook for me is personal. I friend people on Facebook using the…
Using Twitter Lists to See How You’re Perceived Online
People often wonder what others think of them. If you use Twitter to any significant degree there’s a simple way to tell: do a tag cloud on the names of the lists people have added you to. Mine, for example, are: industry, evolution, technology, infosec, nontheists, developers, tech, neatpeeps, blogs, tech, security, infosec, privacy, etc… I think this…
My Twitter Infosec List
I am really looking forward to the potential of Twitter Lists. Here’s my Information Security list. Ping me if I’ve overlooked you. [ Daniel Miessler’s Twitter Information Security List | twitter.com ] And here’s my complete list of…lists. ::
Twitter Explained in Three Paragraphs
People struggle with why Twitter is special. It’s special because it counters, better than any other technology, the timeless social obstacle of “out of sight, out of mind”. Regardless of how much time you’d spend with a given person if they lived nearby, relationships atrophy when distance comes between you. The longer someone you care about is gone,…
Why I’m No Longer Warning People Before I Link to My Own Content Within Social Networking
It is considered good social networking etiquette–especially on Twitter–to warn your followers that you are posting a link to content on your own blog or company website. I hereby reject this for the following reasons: When I follow someone it’s because I think they, on the whole, produce content that I want to read vs. content that I…
Using Twitter Search to Find Interesting People to Follow
So everyone knows by now that Twitter is getting big. Really big. One of the most important things to figure out with Twitter, both for beginners and experts alike, is how to find interesting people that share your interests. The challenge is that you don’t want to just follow people indiscriminately because it gets noisy in a hurry,…
The Power of Twitter Search
Twitter Search continues to impress me. It’s quickly becoming one of the best things about the service. I woke up this morning and noticed that my Feedburner/Google subscriber count had plummeted from around 900 to around 400–a drop of 500. Content creators don’t like that because it makes you start wondering what you did wrong. Was it that…
Why Twitter Works
We all have a problem keeping up with friends and family that have moved away. The problem is simple: we, as humans, can only have so many relationships as priorities in our lives, and we naturally move the people we can see and interact with to the top of our lists. To put it more strongly, people who…
When to Blog vs. Tweet
I’m trying to come up with a simple decision tree, or flowchart, for when something should be tweeted vs. when it should get the respect of a full blog entry. Here’s what I’ve come up with. Move through the blogging rules below and see if you get a match. If you don’t, move on to the Twitter rules.…
Calling Attention to Twitter Micro-Blogging in my Sidebar
I’ve changed the color and increased the font size on my Twitter posts on the right. I’ve done this for a clear reason: to highlight the fact that Twitter being in my sidebar is part of my actual blogging platform, as opposed to supplemental or peripheral content. In other words, in terms of my own Twitter content, Twitter…
Where Twitter Fits
Like many others, I’m trying to figure out where Twitter fits. Not just in my life online, but in general. I recently tweeted a question: Should non-DM tweets include context? In other words, should Twitter remain a micro-blogging platform vs. chat, or is it too late? This captures part of the problem. It’s not a micro-blogging platform if…