Twitter
Viddler
Client LoginThis evening I came across a Google Buzzler that caught my attention and was considering to follow. Then I read her About page only to find this…
“Please don’t feed TWITTER NOISE to your Buzz!”
This presents a problem you see. Twitter is hooked up to my Buzz. I could follow her, but unless I remove Twitter from making updates to Buzz, it is not likely we will become useful to one another.
The flip side to this is that I practically agree. Twitter does not need to be hooked up to Buzz. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. By the same token, I don’t think you want to have such a black and white position about it.
See, I agree with @lindalawrey in that by having Twitter automatically re-post to Buzz you run the risk of losing followers. But if Twitter is hooked up to Buzz, or if any of your sites for that matter, like your blog, say, are “hooked up”, then when you post to these places you must now consider the impact it could have with your Buzz followers.
Now let’s rewind for a moment. Think back to a time, say 100 years ago. Or maybe less than that. Think back to 50 years ago. Or wait maybe even less like 10 years ago. Could you 10 years ago make any sense out of what we are talking about here. Google? Buzz? Twitter? “Hooked up”. What is all this? How is this contributing to society? How is this contributing to mankind?
Anyway. This is getting way to serious. I’m really just bummed that someone won’t follow me because Twitter is hooked up to my Buzz. Darn you Linda Lawrey.
About yhurg
I truly wish it was different because there are so many people on Buzz I’m not able to follow or follow back that have a lot to contribute to Buzz (and they do). However their Twitter streams flood and block those contributions from ever being read, or seen.
There are two reasons why Twitter feeding doesn’t work at Buzz. First and foremost, Buzz doesn’t capture tweets live, one at a time. Buzz grabs them in groups which can flood everyone’s Buzz stream, where you can’t see anything BUT one person’s tweets – pages of them sometimes. Collapsed groups of these tweets sometimes show up, but then if we open the group, we flood our own stream if it hasn’t already been.
Secondly and maybe even more important, though is that tweets are most times, short (character limited) conversations, out of context, on another service (twitter) which make no sense when fed to any other social site. (Not just Buzz). And Buzz is all about engaging conversations. While posting at another social site, you aren’t actually at Buzz to carry on an impending conversation.
While posted links might be of interest (from Twitter), those links generate conversations (and not just “rebuzzes”). And when someone is tweeting, they aren’t at Buzz, minding their posts to participate in these initiated conversations. And those are the people we love to follow. Those that don’t just post, but participate in what they and others post.
I hope this helps explain Buzz a little more to your readers that are just starting to use the service.
While I have Twitter linked to my profile at Buzz, I have my Twitter profile (designated as such), and not my actual Twitter feed. Now that you can certainly do with no feed issues there. I highly recommend using other services for posting to more than one site. I use toolbars, bookmarklets and Google Reader which makes for quick posting, and the ability to quickly decide which post is better suited for each individual service.
Thanks for your post, and bringing attention to how Tweets can sometimes be perceived on other services.
Yes I am totally with you on that. This past week I started a personal Twitter account @yhurg large in part so that my tweets on @autoconversion could remain on my commercial Buzz account. So interesting to see this stuff evolve while we adapt.