Further proof, if proof be needed, that pushing blog posts to twitter (and vice versa) creates nothing but echo. In this instance the only tweet archived from “yesterday” is the tweet announcing the previous day’s tweets (and so on and so forth):

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

A nothing perpetuating itself, filling up the internet and making interesting stuff harder to find.

UK Twitters awoke to a email this morning telling them that updates by text were no more (follow the reaction on Twitter itself). Unlike in the US where the standard has been to pay to receive texts, Twitter has been stumping up the cost of updating UK subscribers. That, according to Twitter has become a cost too much to bear:

It pains us to take this measure. However, we need to avoid placing undue burden on our company and our service. Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users.

Whatever you think of their calculations, you can purchase SMSs much cheaper in bulk (for fractions of a penny) and I’m not convinced that it’s a huge number of people with text updates on at all times, if they can’t afford it then that’s fair enough. Negotiating with the carriers for a cheaper rate doesn’t seem the best solution to me, even if they reduce costs per user growth in Twitter usage will eat into their funding.

Better to take this opportunity to introduce advertising in some form.

If a third party service was to set up and use the Twitter API to send out free text updates, but send one advert for every ten (at the same time as a real update so you didn’t get a false alarm) I’m guessing it would have both a revenue model and a lot of sign-ups. If it introduced additional functionality (perhaps a contacts directory/speeddial thing so you didn’t have to keep typing out @conmpl1cated_names-withpuntuat|on), then it would be adding value to the SMS-based service.

So, perhaps Twitter could do it too — they at least have unfettered access to the API and with the Summize technology they could deliver context sensitive ads. If it worked in the UK, then maybe it could even expand to countries where — at the moment — they can still afford to text you.

Prompted by Mark Steadman’s comment on one of my many blog posts on the evils of crossposting, I’ve turned off the tweet digests that were (to be honest) overwhelming the nonsense blog of mine that is /ramblings.

Mark said:

“What’s your opinion then of WordPress plugins - like the ones on your own site - that post a digest of your Twitter and del.icio.us activity each day? Thankfully you’re not the kind of guy to tweet that stuff, but isn’t that just the same kind of cross-posting?”

With delicious digests or link dumps I can see added value; the posts give time based (and theme based when you’ve been surfing around a subject) context. This can mean that they mean more when posted to a blog rather than as separate links.

That said if a blog does nothing but republish delicious links then it’s worthless.

The delicious feeds and links that you see on this site are carefully (as much as one does) chosen to be in context — and aren’t by any means everything I save. You could subscribe to my entire delicious feed, but unless you’re my mother or my psychiatrist I think you’d be bored (and my mother would be bored anyway). I wouldn’t advise anyone to subscribe to my delicious feed en masse — I use it for a wide variety of destinations (as well as to store links for myself); things tagged “work” come here, those tagged “birminghamuk” go to BiNS, I occasionally do link collections on a subject, and others links go to other places too.  It’s just a mash of my surfing mind, not useful to others.

As for the Twitter digests posts, I can see the point of a post (for your own records as much as anything) but it needs to be carefully positioned so as not to swap the point of your blog. Of course I first set it up “because I could”, I don’t think I would these days if I hadn’t already.

In fact, I’ve turned it off and switched to archiving to my email, thanks Mark for making me think about that.

Ariel Waldman on crossposting with social media:

Recently, there has been a rash of one-size-fits-all services that aim to provide a solution to “managing” various sites like Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku and Facebook all at once. As with most of my rants, they begin on Twitter and then trickle their way into a blog post - and if you’ve seen some of my tweets, you have seen my personal distaste for these services and the people who use them.

Like me, she sees it a spammy, rude and a little needy. More people are making this moral choice to talk only when they’ve got something to say — which can only be a good thing.

Hat duly tipped to Stowe Boyd, who’s in agreement.

Birmingham City Council progressively decided that they would livestream their local election results, which was more of an invitation than us politically-interested twitters needed to provide a ‘backchannel’. Having decided to base round the hashtag #brumcc (a few test tweets fired off as people voted in the day), it all kicked off around 10.25 with a very geeky moan about the format for the streaming (Windows Movie Player) and the standard of the the sound (there was a problem with the gain on the wireless mic I think).

The actual conversation bounced between pub-style debate, willful surrealism, and the kind of listening and reacting to the actual words that microblogging really helps — collating the “did he really just say that?” factor between other viewers rather than waiting for the host to pick the politician up.

Four hours of it made us all flag, but it really was a worthwhile experience and in two years (when the local elections come around again) I really hope the council harness the conversation in some way too. It doesn’t have to be twitter (which, considering the UK local elections borked it, may not be around) but it was really powerful - and if publicised widely could be really useful.

I did something quite strange and possibly annoying for anyone who follows me on twitter today. I tweeted a very-piecemeal book “review” of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It wasn’t my idea - it was Paul Bradshaw’s and I’d be surprised if he didn’t do a much better and more interesting job (I fact I know he did because I was following his tweets).

I did it mainly as an experiment, and also because from the bit I’d already read (and interviews with Clay) I knew that there were a lot of thoughts to share in there.

I learned, I think:

• That I can’t type consistently one-handed (put down the book when you’re trying to communicate, man).
• Communicating ideas as you have them not only forces you to to think concisely (as twitter’s 140 char limit does too), but helps separate points out.
• That I’m knackered, I’m not sure I’ll be doing it again - more from the force of thought than anything else (I could tweet something that long with less concepts and mental power need, but not a book like that again).

Sorry to anyone I annoyed, back to more normal tweet levels from now on.

I will not use twitter, tumblr or my facebook news feed to announce a new blog post.

Who’s with me?

[EDIT] I also vow to keep twitter and Facebook statues separate. (Thanks Si, although that’s a harder one).

The reason is that I don’t want to contibute to the “background noise” I describe here.

bounder’s soup. Soup.io seems to be tumblr with more friend aggregation facilities. All well and good - the bonus feature for those of us that have very many blogs is that you can of course be logged into your tumblr account and your soup account at the same time - leaving two quick bookmark-based microblogging platforms available.

There have been a number of times since I started my tumblr account that I wanted another for a specific purpose, now if I can only remember what they were…

Sign up, but please don’t just use it to push your blog feed, flickr pics etc through automatically.

Via