No twitts in the comments please
25 Aug
Although I think that I understand the possible value that twitter may have, I actually find that I don’t posses the hyperactivity traits needed to have a never ending real time communication, and actually maybe I’m not very communicative at all which results in me wanting to control the time and duration of the communication when I decide that I have to do it.
I used to be very negative about twitter*, but as time flows by even I find that there are some useful aspects for the service, the problem is that it is so over hyped and misused that even for people like me that are not interested in the commotion it is hard to ignore it.
The latest annoying twitter sightings in the WordPress world is in blog comments. For some reason people think that it is cool that people are twitting about their posts, and they are probably right. The problem is that comment are good for discussion and sharing information and sometimes they have a content which is actually more important/interesting then the actual post. Then you got trackbacks, which some WordPress themes relegate to the end of the comment section, and while they are not adding anything to the discussion they let the casual visitor from a search engine to explore other opinions on the topic.
Now comes the twittings as part of the comments. Like the trackbacks they do not add anything real to the discussion, but unlike the trackbacks they are relevant for no more than a day (at least I couldn’t find a reasonable way to follow a discussion on twitter which is more they a day old), so while at the first day from the posting they might add some value to the reader, for the casual visitor from a search engine they will be just a visual and bandwidth dead beef.
Conclusion: even if you enjoy the ego boost which comes from being mentioned by other people, do me (and maybe other people as well) a favor and make your comments section easier to read by cleaning up the twitts from time to time.
*One of my clients (web/social ad company) had a link to the twitter of one of its client which was kind of design firm. I asked once what is the purpose of the twitts? in what situation will it be helpful for a reader to have a real time announcement of something related to design? The answer I got was that maybe I’m wandering in the streets of tel aviv with nothing to do and the twitt will give me an idea. I was far from being impressed with this answer, but at least they have done it as part of their overall service and didn’t charge outrageous sums of money just to open a twitter profile. Wow, it seems like it was in the distant past, but this naive approach for advertising in twitter was articulated in 2008 
