Twittering

Local government on Twitter!

I’m delighted to note that Stratford-on-Avon District Council has its own account on Twitter. What is even better is that they display the badge on their homepage!

This is just the sort of intiative that we’re looking for in various places, like the Social Media CoP, for example. Fine, there are arguments about Twitter, in terms of how many folk actually use it, its notorious flakiness, etc etc… but sometime you just have to give things a go. And it’s great that someone in local government is doing just that.

Plurk – a microblog too far?

Twitter this evening is rife with talk about Plurk, a new micro-blogging service that brings a whole new meaning to the term feature-creep. I’m here.

I mean, the joy of Twitter, and I suspect the reason why we all stick with it despite the appallingly flakey service we receive, is its simplicity. It let you post short messages on the web, and that’s pretty much it. You can do more than that, but that is usually by using a third party service through the APIs.

Plurk adds stuff like groups, called – deliberately provocatively, surely – ‘cliques’, so you can send messages to just a select group of folk, points for regular posting (like that won’t encourage pointless noise…) and the ability to have what look like threaded replies under posts.

I just don’t need this stuff, frankly. The best thing that comes from Twitter is contained within the 140 characters of the posts people make. It’s about the content, not the bells and whistles.

But the most fundamentally annoying thing I found with Plurk during my brief play this evening is the way the whole thing is presented – on a horizontal rather than vertical timeline, which run from right to left. This means that the most recent stuff is the first thing you see, which is good, but once you start scrolling it soon gets really confusing. Well, it does for me.

Lots of people are signing up and giving it a go. But I can’t see anyone sticking with this in the long term. Unless they’re mental.

Why I love web 2.0

Part of the joys of the social web and the community that has built up around it is the sheer informality of the whole thing. Take this, for example: a tweet from Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic this morning:

Loic’s dogshit tweet

Now, how many chief exec’s have you heard of that broadcast messages to the world about how they have just trampled some dog poo barefoot?

Not enough in my view. Thanks for sharing, Loic!

Twitter – awesome source of blog traffic

It was interesting to see the results of the little poll I have been running in my sidebar recently regarding how people read posts on this blog. Out of the 25 votes cast, only four people responded that they read posts via the links that appear on Twitter. The thing is, my blog’s stats show that the largest referrer of traffic to this site every single day is Twitter.

My blog automatically pings my Twitter account with a short message telling everyone that follows me that a new post is up on DavePress, and the title, so they know what it is about. There is a link there, so all people have to do is click that and they’re here. Magic – and much quicker than RSS. This is all done with the plugin TwitterTools by Alex King, and you can download it here.

Well worth it for anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog.

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