Back on the silly microblog

[jducoeur]

In case anybody cares: I've gotten myself back onto Twitter again. I've actually had an account there for ages, but haven't checked it since their IM integration broke months ago. (It's been at "we'll fix it Real Soon Now" ever since, and I can't be bothered to go to their website.)

But in my business, Twitter is kind of expected (you're not anybody in social media these days if you're not on the thing), so I finally downloaded a decent client (Twhirl), and I'm up and running again. I still think it's essentially a toy, but it's one of the few services in approximately the same space as CommYou. (That is, easy semi-realtime conversation.) It serves as a good constant reminder to me of what I'm trying to do better.

Anyway: I have my usual handle over there; feel free to friend me...

Comments

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

I totally don't get Twitter. I really don't. Whenever I see Twitter feeds in LJ, I skip right over them. Then again, I don't get the point of having multiple blogs either unless you use them for wildly different things. Why have Facebook and LiveJournal and MySpace if you're going to essentially post the same stuff to all of them?

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

What's the practical difference between Twitter and IM?

Also, even if there is a difference, why do you feel that Twitter is a toy and IM is a tool?

[jrising.livejournal.com]

After avoiding Twitter without much difficult for quite a while, you piqued my interest with "twitter is expected in social networking circles". That's one of the areas I'm going, so I'm curious how it's used there. Anyway, I'm on now-- jrising.

I don't think I want to juggle another communication client, though. But I think I've found some alternatives: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/pidgin-2-0.ars/4 has a Pidgin plugin for using status messages as Twitter statuses, and I'm sure there's a RSS-to-Pidgin plugin somewhere. Alternative, http://code.google.com/p/microblog-purple/ might be replacement for the latter piece or the whole thing.